7 Common Gambling Biases You Need to Avoid
We all deal with biases—sometimes without even realizing it.
If you were asked to recall everything from last week, last month, or the past year, how much detail could you truly remember? Odds are, you’d recall a handful of standout moments that felt important to you and forget the rest, especially if it wasn’t recent.
That’s just how our brains work. We tend to hold onto recent events while older ones fade, and this selective memory impacts how we approach decisions, especially in gambling.
You might think, “Chelsea’s lost five matches in a row, they can’t lose again!” But that type of thinking, driven by emotions and bias, rarely ends well.
Even if some believe gambling doesn’t contribute much to society, it gives us an interesting glimpse into how human psychology and emotional decision-making unfold under pressure.
Let’s have a look at seven cognitive biases in gambling you need to avoid.
1. Gambler’s Fallacy
This kind of thinking is a major mistake, especially in a random, unpredictable environment like gambling. Take the earlier Chelsea example: just because they’ve lost five times, doesn’t mean a win is “due”. You’re falling into the trap of seeing patterns in past events that have no real predictive power.
Now imagine an even more random scenario—slot machines. You’ve lost hundreds of dollars across your last 10 spins.
With only $20 left, you start thinking, “Surely, this next one will hit.” But it doesn’t, and it’s not because anyone’s against you—it’s just that past losses don’t increase your chances of winning.
Each bet is its own event. If you can start understanding that the outcome of any bet is independent of the last, you’re already on the right track. Focus on probability rather than getting caught up in streaks.
2. Confirmation Bias
Our minds are incredibly powerful, like a fisherman’s net perfectly designed to catch only the fish he prefers, while filtering out the ones he doesn’t want—crayfish, tilapia, the works.
We all fall into this trap. It affects different aspects of life—politics, work, and, yes, gambling. We tend to seek out and hold onto information that supports our beliefs while discarding any evidence that challenges them as if it were a virus.
For instance, a game is about to start, and you see gamblers clinging tightly to their predictions. They cherry-pick facts or trends that confirm their stance, often overlooking data that could point to the failure of their bet. Meaningless trends become truth, while contradictory facts are conveniently ignored.
It’s like being convinced the iPhone 15 is the best phone ever based on five sources you like, even when someone presents 30 sources to prove otherwise—you wouldn’t want to believe it.
Fighting confirmation bias is hard, but mitigation is possible. Regularly challenge your assumptions by reviewing objective data and considering opposing views. That’s how you grow.
3. Recency Bias
If your neighbor asked you about the fastest route from Birmingham to Liverpool, and you’ve driven there recently, you’d likely recommend the familiar route that takes about three hours.
Even though there’s now a faster route via the M6 north to M62 westbound, which cuts it down to two hours, you might not mention it because you’re used to the old way—“it’s what you know”.
This reliance on what’s most easily recalled can lead you astray.
This tendency is often seen in gambling, too. We can get swept up by recent experiences, like a team winning several matches in a row, and base our choices on that streak rather than taking a broader view.
For instance, Liverpool is currently in great form, with a solid winning streak of 18 points from their last seven matches in the Premier League. You might back them heavily based on this dominance while ignoring other critical factors like injuries or tough upcoming opponents that could break the streak.
You are better off making decisions based on long-term data rather than recent streaks, just as you’d re-evaluate your route based on the latest traffic updates.
4. The Bandwagon Effect
If you’ve spent any time around sports betting, you’ve probably noticed the bandwagon effect in action. It’s a real thing and arguably the most interesting bias on our list.
The bandwagon effect is when you end up following the crowd in what you believe or do, without really thinking it through for yourself.
We can’t deny that “crowd knowledge” can be pretty powerful, especially when it comes from averaging out or combining the opinions of multiple experts. This tends to “cancel out” individual biases or mistakes that a single expert might have. So, relying on just one or two experts could expose you to their personal blind spots.
While this crowd knowledge can be useful, it’s not without its problems. For one, finding genuine experts in a sport as unpredictable as football takes time—you can’t really tell who has the competence until they’ve proven themselves over the years. Then there’s the timing issue—when you need to make quick decisions, like reacting to a last-minute line-up change, it’s not exactly practical to gather everyone’s input on the fly.
Moreover, groupthink often sneaks in, with the media and fans pushing certain stories that can sway how individuals think. This can make it tough to stick to your guns if you have a different view to start with.
To be on a safer path, it’s better to make your own decisions based on solid data, rather than just going with what everyone else thinks. This is especially important in fast-moving, unpredictable situations like sports betting, where the crowd isn’t always right.
5. Hindsight Bias
This is a pervasive bias that crops up everywhere, not just in gambling, where it’s naturally made its way in. It’s a complex one, but put simply, this bias makes us think we predicted an event accurately before it happened, especially after things go wrong. The truth is, we’re only seeing it clearly because we know the outcome now.
Our remarkable brains will go to extraordinary lengths to make us feel better, even if it means accepting falsehoods as facts or seeing patterns that aren’t there.
Once hindsight bias takes hold, we start believing we can “accurately” predict other events, too. And that’s where the problems begin.
Take someone who’s just lost a bet—they’ll say they “knew it would happen”—like some sort of soothsayer—even though they hadn’t made any real prediction beforehand.
You see it across poker, sports betting, and lotteries—where people overstate their past predictions. Bettors start remembering their original thoughts as being more accurate than they were, regretting not acting on this supposed “instinct”.
Look at football matches—fans or bettors who shift from being optimistic before the game to claiming they “knew all along” their team would lose after an unexpected result. The reality is that they were as uncertain as the rest of us, but hindsight makes them think otherwise.
You can’t entirely eliminate this learning-limiting bias, but Forbes suggests fighting it by carefully recording your decision-making reasoning, conducting “after-action reviews,” and exploring alternative “what if” scenarios.
6. Survivorship Bias
This is a fascinating bias deeply embedded in our society—where we’re completely fixated on success stories while overlooking those who didn’t make it. It’s not just about celebrating winners, it’s about how we practically pretend the “failures” don’t exist.
Bettors tend to fixate on those “consistently winning” coaches, treating them like an oracle. But, actually, they’re completely ignoring all those coaches who didn’t survive in the industry. And you can’t really blame them—it’s just how our minds are wired to work.
What these bettors aren’t considering is that timing plays a huge role in survival.
You see survivorship bias everywhere, but let’s look at social media startups. Remember Vine? Launched in 2012, it seemed poised for TikTok-level success. Vine crashed and burned by 2017, despite having similar features to platforms that later thrived.
Our remarkable brains conveniently forget that 90% of social media startups fail. We’re too busy idolizing Facebook and Twitter to notice the graveyard of failed platforms. This creates an illusion that success is far more common than it actually is.
The real problem starts when we ignore these failures. Without looking at both sides of the coin—successes and failures—we’re missing the full picture. This skewed view leads to overconfidence and poor decision-making.
If you try 70 different betting strategies and only focus on the few winners, you will be misled. What looks like skill might just be luck in disguise. What you should be doing is analyzing everything—wins and losses alike—to understand what truly drives long-term success.
7. Outcome Bias
This is a strong bias that’s closely related to survivorship bias, but it zeros in on something more specific—how we react to wins and losses in gambling.
Outcome bias is when we judge choices purely by their outcomes. We’re terrible at separating results from the decisions that led to them.
For instance, if a friend gives you an investment tip and it pays off, they’re suddenly a genius, but if it fails, they’re persona non grata. The reality is that we’re conveniently ignoring our own role in using that information or other factors.
You see it everywhere in gambling, where this bias maintains a firm grip on.
Look at that 2021 NFL shocker—the Jaguars beating the Bills 9-6. Bettors might see it as Jacksonville’s brilliance when, really, Buffalo just had a nightmare with turnovers and penalties. The outcome masks what actually happened on the field.
The troubles begin when you start making big bets on the Jaguars based on that single result. You would be setting yourself up for a painful losing streak all because you focused on the “what” instead of the “how.”
