Re: A gambler's dilemma
Some good stuff here.
Would add: if you're line grinding, then beats and losing streaks should get eaten up fairly quickly by your huge sample size. If you're making tens of thousands of bets a year, streaks, good or bad, get diluted.
If you're handicapping, you'll almost certainly be making fewer bets, AND you'll be making them with three clouds hanging over your head constantly.
Cloud #1: maybe, even if you've had a good history of beating a sport, you've previously just been lucky. If 10% of sports bettors beat a sport pretty good this year on luck alone, then 1% will do that two years in a row, and 1% of "all sports bettors" makes for a lot of guys completely convinced that they're winners. Winning because you're lucky feels the same as winning because you're good. So maybe you aren't really being unlucky now, maybe you're just having your previous good luck balanced out. Or as we say in poker, maybe the cards are breaking even on your sorry, luck-box self.
Cloud #2: Even if you've genuinely been a great capper in a sport, the market may have caught up to you. There are some statistical measures you can employ to somewhat detect this possibility, but the market changes can be subtle and it's always possible that you are now, for invisible reasons, the fish.
Cloud #3: Maybe you are just being unlucky, but you can be unlucky long enough to go broke. And though BR management can help, at some point, if it calls for bets so small they aren't worth making because they won't pay your bills even if you win, then you have to move on, and no whining about "unfairness" is warranted. No body else cares about your bad luck, and the only thing less valuable than sympathy is self-pity.