Sports Betting and Managing your Bankroll Monday, Jan 9 2012
Online Sports Betting 12:07 pm
Most sports betting “experts” and gurus recommend that we must maintain a solid bankroll that is exclusively intended for our wager on our favorite sports events. You should establish a clear distinction between the money that you use in building your bankroll and the money that is intended for other purposes, like savings, retirement, bills payments, etc.
While it is logical that you set aside a portion of your budget for your sports betting activities, most sports pundits don’t enjoy this luxury of having sufficient funds which they can allocate exclusively for sports betting. Thus, it is best that you determine the bankroll that you can afford given your cash position and which you can maintain over the course of the entire season. This means that you need to pursue the kind of sport betting activities that will not unduly affect your lifestyle and put too much stress on your cash position.
For instance, if you feel that you will get into serious financial bind when you lose an aggregate amount of $10,000 over the course of an entire season, then you need to scale back and find the amount that is within your financial comfort zone. You have to remember that no one is immune from the sports betting “sinkhole” and this includes the best handicappers. The truth of the matter is that even the sharpest handicappers can get themselves in a serious bind and this only proves that it is imperative for sports bettors to determine the amount that they can afford to lose.
Setting your Sports Betting Expectations
As soon as you are able to establish a solid bankroll for your sports betting activities, the next thing that you must do is to establish realistic sports betting expectations in terms of the number of wagers that you should make during the season and the percentage of the your wagers that is expected to give you a win.
Your main objective is to utilize the information that will help you ascertain the amount that you should wager per game while ensuring that you don’t run the risk of using your bankroll at any given time during the current season. Some of the seasoned sports bettors set their threshold of going broke at 0.2 percent.
As far as your targets are concerned, it is best that you take a more conservative mindset. Even if you had a 62 percent winning clip last year, it would not be realistic if you set your sights on this target for the current season if you have not been hitting the winning clip for years. At best, you must set your target as close to 50 percent as possible. In this way, you will allow yourself some extra elbow room so that you have lesser chance of scratching the bottom of your coffers for the rest of the season. If you have been religiously maintaining a record of your sports betting activities in the last four seasons and established a relatively solid winning percentage, then you can adopt that winning percentage as your target for the current season and use it as your yardstick in determining the average bet that you can make for each of the games for the rest of the season.
The number of wagers that you can make for the season is also a critical aspect of your money management model. You have to remember that the variance becomes more pronounced as you wager in more games during a season. Thus, you have to stick to the betting principle that the long term success of your money management strategy hinges on your conservative mindset when establishing your expectations or targets on the number of games that you will come out winner.
Setting a Fixed Unit Amount of Wager per Play for the Entire Season
There are many money management systems for sports betting that advocate the use of fixed percentage for the wager amount based on the size of the bankroll on a weekly basis. This means that if you started the current season with an initial bankroll in the amount of $10,000 and a fixed betting percentage of 5% on each game, then you will launch your sports betting activities for the current season with a bet of $500 per game.
If your total winnings for the first week amount to $1,000, then you would be betting 5 percent of $11,000 ($10,000+$1,000) for the following week or $550 per game. In the event that you lose $1,000 on the first week, then your wagering amount for the second week would amount to $450 per game or 5 percent of $9,000 ($10,000 – $1,000). Under this money management system, your wagering amount will vary as your bankroll increases or decreases each week.
The downside of this money management system is two-pronged. You stand to lose the opportunity to maximize the earning potential of your sports betting activities if you have been making the smallest bets during the part of the season when you have been stringing a lot of winning picks and making the biggest bets during the worst weeks of the current season.
In fact, even if you are going on a pretty smooth run during the season, this money management template is more likely to give you an earning which will fall short of your potential income had you used an alternative money management strategy where you have a fixed amount of wager per game. Generally, a money management strategy where you adjust your wager based on an established percentage of your bankroll will only work in your favor if there are no losing weeks during the season. Since even the sharpest and seasoned handicappers have their fair share of losing weeks, it would be better if you adopt a system where you a fixed amount of wager for each game of the season. sb