Believing something is due

Independent events have no memory. A coin that has landed heads nine times is exactly as likely to land heads on the tenth, and a team that has failed to cover six weeks running is owed nothing by anybody.

The intuition comes from expecting short sequences to look like long ones. Over thousands of trials the proportions do settle down, and the mind wrongly reads that as a force pulling recent results back toward the average.

There is one version that is real and is the opposite of the folk one. If a team keeps failing to cover, the market's number for them may be wrong — which argues for backing against them, not for them.

Here is the catch. The belief is most persuasive during a losing run, which is precisely when it triggers the largest stake. It is the mechanism underneath chasing, dressed as patience.

What to do with it. Treat every bet as the first one. If you would not take it as an opening bet at that price, the history does not make it better.