Bahisçi Psikolojisi ve Totemleri

Bettor Psychology and Totems

abstract

Sports betting looks like a numbers game. Bettors study statistics, run their own analyses and talk about yield and risk management. And yet once the money is down, all they can do is wait for the match to end.

So this netnography asks whether there's one last thing they do to win, and how a crowd that prides itself on data deals with luck. Netnography is ethnography done online, so the field was Turkish betting communities, where football bets through İddaa dominate.

I started with the bahis topic on Ekşi Sözlük to learn the jargon, then read the betting forums of Tribün Dergi. Eventually I moved to Bahis Klavuz, a forum only about betting (when I collected the data it had around 79,000 members and 3.7 million messages).

There I followed threads like the one about jinxed teams and players you keep losing on. The forum turned out to have its own culture, with a clear hierarchy based on how good a bettor you are.

People address each other as abi and hocam (roughly bro and teacher). Also, you're expected to back up what you say with data, even a gut feeling.

Still, I found five main totems, around picking the team, picking the betting shop, picking the live score site, horse racing bets and the day the match is played. These rituals usually grow out of winning and losing streaks.

They come with feelings close to addiction and obsession, even among the most rational bettors. I did this study during my master's, and it's in Turkish.

read the pdf (Turkish)