Managing Your Sports Betting Bankroll

Your Level Of Skill Is A Big Factor

One of the most important considerations to how well you may expect to do at sports betting is how much skill and experience you have. Make no mistake about it, sports betting is not luck, it is a matter of skill. While the outcomes of individual bets certainly do have some luck involved, as in the ups and downs of the contests you bet on, this luck evens out pretty quickly and over the long run your success always comes down to how good you are at picking winners.

If you have never bet on sports before, it is best to start out betting pretty conservative amounts, at least until you get a feel for where your skill level is at. Keep in mind that in order to be successful at sports betting, you only need to win a small percentage more often than you lose, so treat all gains as very significant, as they are.

In judging your skill level, it’s also important not to focus on too small of a sample size. For instance you may win 7 out of the first 10 bets you make, and with a small amount of bets like this, it may be that you have just gotten lucky. Remember, luck can play a factor in the short run. So this doesn’t mean that you can pull this off consistently, and in fact even the world’s best sports betters don’t win anywhere near as often as this over time. 6 out of 10 over time is phenomenal in fact, and will lead to vast riches in the long term.

On the other hand, you may only win 3 out of the first 10 bets you make, and this would clearly be a matter of bad luck, even if you are a very bad sports bettor, as long as these bets aren’t all made on long shots. In these examples I’m assuming fairly even money bets, and it isn’t easy to get 7 out of 10 of these wrong, just as it isn’t easy to get 7 out of 10 of them right. If you knew how to pick this many wrong, you could just bet the other side of your picks and make a fortune.

As your record includes more and more bets, the results that you achieve become more and more reliable, and before too long you get a pretty good handle on how good you are or how much more you need to work on. So as you do this, you can bet with more confidence as you become more confident in your selections.

Even The Best Don’t Go Too Big

When you compare bet sizing as a proportion of a sports bettor’s bankroll, between less skilled sports bettors and professional ones, you will almost always see the pros betting a smaller percentage of their bankroll per bet than the more novice bettors. Some of them actually go too far with this and could benefit from going bigger, but their years of experience teach them to want to be able to deal with any sort of bad luck that may happen and not be hurt by it.

Less competent bettors don’t pay enough attention to this though and you can go on a bad luck streak from time to time and you should not have these streaks putting a hurt on your bankroll, such that you no longer have the bankroll to make your normal sized bets.

If you have to drop down bet sizes, you will be making it harder to make the money back that you lost during the bad luck streak, and this in fact can really put the hurt on you, since our advantage is small and we should not expect ourselves to become mired in a situation where it can take quite a while to get back to where we were.

Ideally, you should never put yourself in a position where you have to reduce your bet sizes, and this is why top pros maintain one hundred, two hundred, or even more bets in reserve to ensure that this potential problem is taken right out of the equation.

How Many Bets Should You Hold?

Professional sports bettors do have to hold a bigger reserve than more casual bettors, out of necessity. This is their livelihood, and if they lose their bankroll or it suffers a big hit, this can be very damaging to their careers. Non professionals can afford to take more chances, but at the same time they should be kept within reason.

As a rule of thumb, non professionals should base the size of their reserves, meaning the size of their bets relative to their overall bankroll, by how big of a deal it would be to lose it all. If you deposit $100 and you’re not going to be really bothered much by losing it, and you can make a similar sized deposit pretty easily if you need to, then the risk here is very low and you can be more aggressive with your bet sizing.

If you have built your bankroll up to several thousand dollars or more, and it would not be easy to get back to where you are now if you lost it, then this is a different story. The larger the bankroll, the more need that you have to look to protect it.

So as you can see there’s no set amount that is going to work in all situations, but as a rule of thumb, betting one twentieth of your bankroll would be a good place to start, and then increasing this amount gradually as you go up, to say, one hundredth of it when you get to the point where you’re making your living with this, and even twice that as you build things even bigger.

The Advantages Of Larger Sizing Initially

Being able to bet more not only has the advantage of making more money from a given amount of bets, it also allows you to accelerate the process and move up to higher and higher bets over time. This is the exciting thing about getting to the point where you are a profitable sports better, as this skill can and should be leveraged over time all the way to the stratosphere.

If you are, for instance, betting $10 a game, and you are winning over time, you are eventually going to get to the point where you can afford to bet more, say $15 a game. Now you’re making more money and things build up to where you can go with $20 a game, and so on.

You can keep this process going all the way up to tens of thousands of dollars per game, or more. All you need to do this in fact is a small edge on your bets, and the rest will happen in time. It does take some real time to go from small to very large, but it can and does happen, and like clockwork in fact.

This is why you need to build more and more safety into your bankroll as you climb the ladder to bigger and bigger profits, because as you go along there’s more and more to protect. While safety does slow you down a bit over betting more aggressively, it is necessary to achieve a good balance of both, just like you want a big expensive house but also need house insurance in case something happens to it, and the bigger the house, the more insurance you need to buy.

Some Tips For Newer Sports Bettors

If you are newer, then you really want to give yourself some real bang for the buck as you learn this business and hone your skills. It takes time and effort to become a successful sports bettor unless you are truly brilliant. Perhaps you are, but for most folks it will take some time and they will need the benefit of a significant amount of experience.

So going smaller during this period is wise, and the further deposits you make should be more toward adding to your bankroll and not replacing it. You do need to realize that until you get to the point where you are profitable over the long run, you will need to do some replenishing. However, the exciting thing is that as you are working your way toward this long term profitability, this is the promised land and once you get there, the effort that you have put into all this will be more than worthwhile.

Another important thing to keep in mind is that if you are stressing too much about your results, you are definitely going too big. I don’t think many newer sports bettors go too small in fact, but a great many go bigger than they should, and this has them not only busting out too much but getting way too frustrated with this process along the way.

Sports betting is meant to be, first and foremost, fun, and it surely is a lot of fun if done right. Sure, it can make you a lot of money over time as well, but it needs to be fun. There is no reason why you shouldn’t be having lots of fun along the way.

So if you find yourself not having as much fun at this as you should, this is probably the best reality check you could ever ask for here. So have a hard look at why and you will find that it is almost certainly due to it causing you too much stress, and this stress is caused by taking too big of a stake in games. You might want to be like the hare, but in this story, the tortoise won the race, slow and steady, and the tortoise wins this race too.

Don’t be afraid to bet though, as you should be doing all the betting you want, while keeping the size of bets within your comfort range. If you haven’t tried out our top recommended sports betting site, Titan Bet, I invite you to check them out by clicking here and allowing them to give you some free bets to get you started with them.