With more and more bookmakers offering an ever wider range of betting markets on a huge number of different sports from every part of the world, it is no wonder that sports betting in Tanzania and everywhere else is taking on such an upward trend.
On a global basis, sports betting revenues are demonstrating record growth rates, reflecting the growing interest of people in backing their favorite sport, team or athlete or making money from predicting sports games’ outcomes. Casual bettors, regular bettors, professional bettors or new bettors, are all bombarded with plenty of offers, bonuses and promotions made by sportsbooks and betting sites that want either to sustain their customer base or acquire new customers.
Lately one of the most popular promotions given by bookmakers, such as 888starz, is the offering of Cash Out options. Cash-out is having a bet settled early – before the event is actually over – by taking a certain amount of cash which corresponds to the odds at the time of opting for this decision. Simply put, cashing out is liquidating the bet before it loses, in order to lock in some profits.
As the game or event you’ve placed a bet on unfolds, those sportsbooks that offer Cash-out, will continuously present you with different cash-out prices, adjusted to the continuously changing odds of your bet to win. So, as a bettor, you have the chance to settle a premature bet in order to secure some money, when you feel that your backed event is not going to happen or simply enough your team is not going to win.
While the Cash-out option has been welcomed by many bettors, there are some punters who are advocating against it, on many grounds, while recognizing that it has value only under certain circumstances.
For the average punter, a cash-out option means locking in profits, when things are not going exactly as expected. When they see their bet having pretty good chances of losing, they want to secure some of the profit – of course, this profit is nothing close to what they would have generated if the bet was to win, but sometimes for some punters, it’s “better safe than sorry”.
For many professional punters or sharp bettors, the Cash-out option is not an option for the most part of their online wagering game. When you are tempted to cash-out a bet because it might lose, then you were never on the right path, you were far beyond your level of risk tolerance in the first place. That’s the basic argument. When people place bets, they should bet what they can afford to lose, because if they can’t stand what they are risking, then they should simply not bet.
An alternative to Cash-out for such players is to bet on the other side. This, they say, is more strategic and far more pertinent to a betting strategy than simply cashing out a bet, before it is lost. Betting on the other side allows you to develop more betting skills and competencies which will be useful if you plan to take betting seriously, plus it doesn’t interfere with the equity in your bet.
However, even professional bettors acknowledge that sometimes – very few in fact – the Cash Out is helpful. When? Well, this depends on how one looks at it. For the hard-core punters, cashing out is valuable when you have the opportunity to place the same bet with better odds. So, if bettors are able to find better odds for the same market, then cashing out can be useful.
This is particularly relevant if the Cash-out offer is provided to users before a game even starts. So, if you are given the chance to cash-out and at the same time you have found higher odds in another bookmaker, then you should probably take the shot, cash-out and re-bet on another betting site.
Cash-out is largely promoted by bookmakers and the truth is that it appears to be a very good thing for those who are less risk-tolerant or who take a more loose approach to betting. But for the more professional bettors, the Cash Out option is simply not an option.