Thoughts on Beginner's Luck in Gambling (Horse Racing)

Hello, or good evening, this is Sekitou.

This time, I'm going to talk about gambling. Regarding pachinko, I wrote in this dream article that I've never done it.

The man who buys soccer lottery tickets with zero knowledge

So, what I used to do was horse racing. From the past until now, I occasionally buy lottery tickets. And here, what I've been buying for a while now is the soccer lottery is how it feels.

The soccer lottery has types like toto and BIG, but it's a form of gambling where you predict the results of professional soccer matches. toto is a soccer lottery where you predict the wins and losses yourself and BIG is a soccer lottery where the win/loss predictions are assigned randomly at the time of purchase.

I buy both toto and BIG, but despite buying toto, I know nothing about soccer. Neither domestic nor international. In the first place, I don't know what teams are in the current J1, and I barely know any players. The only player I know is that person from Vera&John who's been in the news lately (and even then, just the name, I don't know what kind of player they are).

Rather than not knowing, I am intentionally trying not to know.

The reason is that my experience when I was doing horse racing has influenced me. It was around the time of T.M. Opera O and Hishi Miracle.

My hit rate was higher when I knew nothing

When I first started horse racing, it was a state of only having things I didn't understand. I didn't really know the strong horses at the time, I only knew the name Take Yutaka among jockeys, and I didn't really understand sires or broodmares. Plus, there are so many factors involved in predicting, like the characteristics of the racetrack such as clockwise or counter-clockwise turns and the length of the straight, and how to read past results in horse racing newspapers, you know, in horse racing.

So, you'd think a beginner who doesn't know any of that couldn't possibly win a horse racing bet... but surprisingly, I was hitting quinellas quite often.

Since I didn't really understand, I used the predictions of the horse racing newspaper reporters as a reference.

It wasn't that I bought someone's prediction as is, but rather I combined the favorite with horses that had many ▲ or △ marks. If I chose the favorite and the second favorite, the odds were low, and it wasn't very profitable even if I won, so I chose things that would have slightly higher odds by relying only on the reporters' prediction marks.

And, this would hit reasonably often.

Based on the idea that "If I can hit this much while not knowing anything, wouldn't I hit even more if I studied?", I studied various things like bloodlines, but as I started studying and gaining knowledge, it actually stopped hitting. Seriously, I remember a period where I didn't hit at all and was genuinely holding my head in my hands.

In the end, it's not fun if you don't win, so I quit horse racing.

It's easy to dismiss this as beginner's luck, but I now think that when you don't know anything, human sixth sense (intuition) is at work. Conversely, as knowledge increases, the sixth sense stops working, so you lose. And then, if you push your knowledge to the limit, the probability of winning increases even without a sixth sense, or something like that, right?

I gave up at the stage where I had increased my knowledge halfway. In other words, if I dare not increase my knowledge, my intuition should work!

Eh, how much did I win on the soccer lottery?

Shut up, don't ask!

Thank you for reading, that is all.