How to Manage Your Bankroll?
The single most important part of a winning sports betting strategy is bankroll management. Bankroll management refers to how you choose to allocate and handle your funds while making bets. Proper bankroll management can help increase the longevity of your bets and help to propel you to the upper echelon of professional betting. Improper bankroll management is a quick ticket to Brokes-ville.
Why Bankroll Management Is Important
All right, so we’ve told you that bankroll management is important. It would seem only proper for us to tell you why it matters so much. What are the three things that you need to make a sports bet? You need a pick on who you think is going to win, you need somewhere to place that bet, and you need…money. If you have blown through all of your money, what good are the other two?
Bankroll management is a system of checks and balances that ensure you’ve always got a foot in the game. Without these practices, you’ll end up rocketing through your money in no time, and you’ll be left on the sidelines.
Choosing a Starting Balance
The first aspect of bankroll management is deciding how much money you’re going to have in your bankroll. Let’s take a step back even further first, though, to make something crystal clear. The money that you are using to bet on games should be completely separate from the money that you are using to live your life and pay your bills. If your betting money is coming out of the same fund as the money you use to buy groceries, it’s time to make a change.
It’s impossible to make rationally correct decisions without emotion when you’re worried about paying your bills or losing money that you can’t afford. If you’ve got all of your money in the same account, you’re going to lose your mind by constantly evaluating how much money you can or cannot spend on a bet.
Here’s the solution: you need to have a completely separate fund for your sports betting. This is known as your bankroll. This money should be money that you do not need for bills or living. It should be fully dedicated to your sports betting. What we’ll talk about having you do is setting a limit, and if you go over that, you can “withdraw” money from your bankroll and move it over to your life-roll.
Bet Sizing Guidelines
Now that you’ve decided on the total amount that you’d like to use for your sports betting, we need to take a look at how much you should be betting on each wager that you’re making. For example’s sake, we’re going to assume that you have decided to make your bankroll $500.
The idea with sports betting is that you are looking to be a long-term winner. While running the risk of sounding like a cheesy cliché again, sports betting is a marathon and not a sprint. This means that you shouldn’t be looking to double that $500 on day one, but you should be looking to slowly build and slowly see some gains.
If you are looking to bet very conservatively, your bets should be 1%-2% of your bankroll.
If you are looking to bet an average amount of risk, your bets should be 3% of your bankroll.
If you are looking to bet very aggressively, your bets should bet 4%-5% of your bankroll.
For those of you who really want to play things safe, the conservative approach is probably your friend. If you’re an “average” bettor or aren’t sure where to start, the middle number of 3% might fit you nicely. Lastly, if you’re someone who is looking to push the envelope, the 4%-5% might be to your liking. Do remember, though, that this comes with much higher risk of potentially having to reload your bankroll if you go on a bad streak.
Do I always have to bet this amount on every bet?
A great follow-up question is whether you should be betting the same amount on every bet that you make. The answer is no. You should be betting the amount that you’re comfortable with and that lends itself best to your strategy. These numbers should be viewed more as maximums instead of suggested bet sizes. You should alter your bets based on how certain you are in your picks and how much potential value there is in each.
The Role Variance Plays with Different Bet Types
One thing that you’re going to need to take into account is what types of bets you are making. Certain bet types are going to have a higher variance and will require you potentially to endure more losses before cashing in on your gains. For example, if you’re betting NFL point spread bets, you won’t be dealing with as much variance as if you are betting five-team parlays.
The less likely you are to win the types of bets you are betting, the more your bankroll is going to fluctuate. While you are probably going to be making several different types of bets, make an educated prediction of the main types of bets you will be making. If they are higher-variance bets, bet more along the conservative side of things. If the bets are of the lower-variance nature, you can choose anywhere along the spectrum that you’d like.
A Sports Betting Account Reset
In the last section, we discussed not changing your bet sizes until you go through a reset. What is a sports betting reset? A sports betting reset is when you take the time to either realize profits, reload your account to its starting point, or change your betting limits. The reason that you do all of this at once is so that you aren’t losing your mind recalculating everything every time you make a bet.
Setting an Upper Limit
An upper limit is a number that, if you are over it during a reset, you’ll realize that profit.
Dangers to Your Bankrol
Most people think that the only threat to their bankroll is making poor picks. While constantly picking losers is going to kill your bankroll slowly, there are a few other threats that you need to be aware of. These are important because these threats can crush you and your bankroll even if you’re doing everything right and making great picks.
Alcohol and Drugs
Sometimes the greatest threat to your bankroll is you when you’re not yourself. If you’re someone who likes to drink or engage in other extracurricular activities, you’re going to want to make sure that you don’t let this affect your sports betting. The best advice we can give you is to make all the bets you want to make before you start drinking or doing whatever it is that you enjoy. There is nothing wrong with enjoying games the way you want to, but you should probably take care of all your betting while you’re still in your right mind.
People who are drunk or “on something else” sometimes have a tendency to make irrational bets or bet amounts larger than they are really comfortable with. If this is something you struggle with, you need to put safeguards in place to make sure you don’t waste your profits. If this means leaving money at home, do it. If it means staying away from the casino while you’re inebriated, do it. If this means keeping the betting app off of your phone and only betting from the website, do it.
Emotional Rollercoaster
One of the most underrated hard parts of sports betting is dealing with the emotional rollercoaster. Every game you bet is going to get your emotions rolling, and a string of wins or losses could start to entice you to bet against your strategy. Sometimes this manifests as you making bets without thinking them through and sometimes it manifests as you making larger bets than you’d like to.
During losing streaks (which are inevitable), you can be tempted to bet bigger to try to get your losses back faster. On the same token, during big winning streaks, you can be tempted to bet more to try to press your winnings. Both of these are losing strategies. While they might work sometimes, they’re ill-advised. In the long run, they are going to be losing plays.
Regardless of how you are feeling, you need to stick to your plan. If you’re struggling with this, you need to look into putting some safeguards in place to prevent you from doing something stupid and costing yourself money. At the end of the day, this comes down to you looking out for you. If you’re getting too emotional and it’s affecting your betting, figure out what you need to do to protect yourself.
The Final Word
Bankroll management might not be sexy, but it’s the key to longevity within the industry. If you have serious hopes and dreams about being a professional or more serious bettor one day, then you need to be ready to do what it takes. If that means getting yourself in check and putting in some effort to get these guidelines ingrained in your betting strategy, then that’s what you have to do.Making correct picks is only part of the battle to the top. Protect your bankroll so that you’re always in the game. It’s hard to make any money when you don’t have any money to bet with.