Progressive Betting Is A Good Way To Manage Your Bankroll
In sports betting as in other gambling endeavors, bankroll management is a key to long-term success. Although there are many methods that might prove worthwhile, progressive betting is one fundamentally sound strategy that you should consider.
Basically, progressive betting involves sticking to a set amount per bet depending on your bankroll, then increasing the size of the unit after you have made a profit from your starting point. Similar methods are used in many instructional materials for games such as blackjack and craps, and the recommendations vary depending on the author, but we’re going to take a more conservative stance than most gaming-advice authors because they tend to recommend a risky and highly volatile strategy once you have increased your working capital.
Financial discipline is a difficult skill to learn and it’s counterintuitive to a gambler’s mentality, but it’s a skill that must be perfected in order for you to see long-term success in sports betting, provided you’ve taken the time and effort to build handicapping acumen that has shown a consistently winning record.
Here’s an example that uses a conservative approach but one that should prove effective so long as you keep your discipline; remember, gambling will always involve a certain amount of swings, and you need to be able to withstand occasional downturns in order to avoid taking yourself out of the game by going broke.
Let’s say you start with a bankroll of $1,000, and you either deposit this with a reputable online sportsbook or, if you live in Nevada, you keep this cash set aside for your sports betting business. A recommended unit to start with would be $22 to win $20 on each game, or roughly 2 percent of your bankroll. Some experts might recommend you risk up to 4 or 5 percent, but again this limits your flexibility should you hit a cold streak. Yes, it might take time to build up your bankroll, but remember that achieving success at sports betting is a marathon, not a sprint.
Let’s say you bet an average of one game per day for a year, and come away with a respectable record of 210-150. After accounting for the house juice on each bet, you are left ahead by about 50 units, or another $1,000. You have now doubled your bankroll to $2,000.
In this case, you could now up your bets to $44 to win $40 on each game, keeping the same 2 percent of your bankroll in play, but now yielding twice the margin of profit that you had when you started. Conventional wisdom would also suggest that if you were able to double your starting $1,000 by betting $22 per game, then you have achieved enough of a track record to warrant risking more of your bankroll.
Even so, we don’t want to go crazy here and risk losing what we worked so hard to win. Even a conservative bump in your unit, let’s say up to 3 percent, will give you a higher win margin while still providing a cushion to fall back on. In this instance, you could start betting $66 to win $60 on each game, just a tad over 3 percent of your bankroll to account for the juice. Using this method, you would need to clear just 17 units to make your next $1,000, instead of the 50 you needed to earn the same amount when you started.
Once you get more comfortable with your skill set and have achieved a measure of success, rating the quality of the pick and integrating this into your wager can become part of your strategy.
Let’s say your standard unit is $22 but occasionally you feel a certain game is a “can’t miss” proposition on one team. In this case you call the pick a “two-unit play” and up your wager to $44. This takes advantage of your superior confidence in the pick, while still limiting your liability. However, you should keep accurate records at all times. If you don’t show at least a 65 percent win ratio on games in which you raise your unit, this could be an indication that the extra amount of the money is affecting your thinking, or simply that your perceived advantage does not materialize as often as you had hoped.
In either case, don’t increase your unit if the amount of the wager makes you uncomfortable, or if you show a break-even or losing record over an extended test case of such games. The more experience you get, the more confident you’ll feel pulling the trigger when the situation calls for it. In the meantime, keeping your bets at a consistent unit while showing a winning record, no matte the margin, will always keep you in the game.
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