The bestselling book What to Expect When You’re Expecting by Heidi Murkoff has long been a guide for pregnant mothers, offering practical advice to navigate the uncertainties of pregnancy, childbirth and parenthood. Few things generate more preparation, anxiety and expectation than awaiting the arrival of a child.
Pregnancy is a masterclass in balancing hope with pragmatism. Where mothers once relied on advice from a close network of women, today they sift through a trove of content from books to countless anecdotes from family and friends. Yet through all this, realism tends to prevail. After all, pregnancy is a well-documented biological process with largely predictable outcomes.
Across town, someone hunches over their phone, analysing statistics, spreads and player matchups, convinced that their betting system will soon deliver consistent profits. Online sports bettors are “expecting” in their own way. But while expecting mothers arm themselves with knowledge and embrace uncertainty, many sports bettors operate under a dangerous delusion: the belief that gambling is a game of skill rather than luck, ignoring the mathematical certainty of negative expected returns.
Pregnant women typically prepare with a healthy dose of realism. They know childbirth will be painful. They understand sleepless nights await. They recognise their bodies will undergo significant changes. When a woman becomes pregnant, she enters a process governed by biological certainty. While individual experiences vary, pregnancy follows predictable patterns from morning sickness to the inevitable arrival of a child.
Contrast this with the sports bettor who diligently reviews statistics and player performance, tracking forums and picking up “insider” tips, convinced that their “research” grants them an edge. They speak confidently about “value bets”, “line shopping” and their ability to spot “market inefficiencies”. Yet their expectations are built on statistical misinterpretations and cognitive biases rather than biological certainty.
No safe bets
The sports betting industry thrives on perpetuating the illusion of skill. Terms like “sharp money” create a veneer of expertise. Social media pundits boast about “proven strategies” and tales of big wins, while losses are conveniently ignored. The reality is stark: the commission taken by bookmakers, known as the vigorish or vig for short, ensures a negative expected return for bettors over time.
A comprehensive analysis published in 2015 in the Journal of Gambling Studies examined almost 7-million bets placed across European soccer leagues between 2005 and 2013 by more than 40,000 individual bettors and found that only 13.5% of bettors showed any profit, and less than 2% maintained profitability over the whole period.
Those winners largely benefited from variance – statistical noise that creates short-term illusions of skill – rather than superior analytical abilities. Or, to put it another way, sports bettors operate in a realm where chance and uncertainty are disguised as calculated risk.
Unsurprisingly, most online sports bettors are men. Research published in the same journal found that 67% in the UK are male, while a US survey by Morning Consult puts the figure in that country at 70%. Many convince themselves that skill and “insider knowledge” can turn betting into investing – a pursuit with positive expected returns.
They ignore the fundamental truth that bookmakers set odds specifically to ensure their own profitability, not to create fair markets where skill prevails. Each rand wagered mathematically decreases their expected return.
This difference in approach to expected returns between pregnant mothers and sports bettors reveals a profound psychological divergence. The sports bettor constructs increasingly complex narratives to explain why their losses are temporary setbacks on the path to inevitable success, whereas the pregnant mother knows that discomfort, pain, and change are unavoidable aspects of bringing new life into the world.
Lose your illusions
Why do people continue betting despite mounting evidence of negative returns? The psychology is fascinating.
Selective memory helps bettors vividly recall wins while minimising losses. Confirmation bias leads them to overvalue information supporting their predictions while dismissing contradictory data. The near-miss effect, when a bet loses narrowly, creates the illusion that success is just around the corner.
Perhaps most powerful is the illusion of control. Sports knowledge creates a false sense that one can predict inherently unpredictable outcomes with the occasional, dopamine-fuelled win.
Watching games, analysing the countless statistics produced, and following sports news makes bettors feel connected to the outcome. Platforms further nurture this fantasy with promotions like “free bets” or “expert picks”, creating the veneer of a merit-based competition.
The bettor’s investment in time and money feeds that illusion. Their emotional investment creates attachment to outcomes they cannot influence, often leading to classic sunk-cost fallacy, more commonly known as chasing lost causes. It is a national and personal tragedy that a person thinks their time spent gambling leads to better returns than generating actual income through pursuing formal or informal work.
Investing involves allocating money towards assets with positive expected returns based on fundamental value creation, productivity gains, or economic growth. Whether purchasing stocks, bonds or real estate, legitimate investments derive their value from underlying productive activities generating actual goods and services.
The expected return is positive because these assets typically create more value than they consume over time.
This stands in stark contrast to sports betting, where no new value is created – money merely changes hands with the house extracting a guaranteed percentage. Bettors should listen to their mothers. They need to develop a more honest relationship with reality.
Perhaps the most valuable expectation of all is understanding that some things follow reliable patterns while others remain fundamentally unpredictable – and wisdom lies in knowing the difference.
Dr Thomas Brennan is CEO and co-founder of Franc Group (Pty) Ltd, a platform that makes smart investing simple and accessible to everyone. He has over 20 years of experience in management, product development, software engineering, machine learning and financial services.
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