Advanced Bankroll Management.

Your Sports Betting Bankroll Guide

The basic rule of bankroll management is that you gamble around 3% or less of your bankroll on any one bet or account reload.

This basic rule is designed to stop you burning through your bankroll in short order or seeing it all disappear in one go playing blackjack. Laugh? I kid you not. More people than ever put their entire bankroll on the line in the name of having a good time without realising there is a better way. This is why casinos are so successful and make so much money – loads of chumps ready and willing to part with a ton of cash.

Professional sports gamblers know that there will always be variance and it is how you deal with that variance that is the difference between being a loser and a winner.

To build your bankroll you will need to get good at sports betting. But to get good you will need to make mistakes and learn the ropes – the aim is to do it whilst losing the least amount of money possible.

In sports betting you are aiming for around a 60% win rate. Sound easy? It's much easier to have a losing streak and lose your bankroll if you are playing over your head. Let's give you an example:

Let's play the classic coin toss game. Heads or tails

We both start with a bankroll of £100 and its £1 a flip.

Over the course of 1,000 flips we would both be close to our original starting bankroll. That is just the law of averages at work. We both have a 50% chance of winning. The more you flip the closer you come to matching the original starting odds.

If you have kids this is an exciting game to play until they catch on that they are not ever going to win!

Sometimes you will win three or four in a row and sometimes it will swing the other way but over a long period of flipping we would both be back at where we started.

If I was now to give you a 10% advantage so that every time you won I paid out £1.10 over the course of 1000 flips we would have 500 wins each with you paying me £1 per flip and me paying you £1.10 per flip.

You – 500 * £1 = £500 paid out.

Me - 500 * £1.10 = £550 paid out.

With this sort of percentage advantage you can't fail to lose and it's easy money.

So now if I offered you the same percentage advantage but we upped the stakes to £20 per flip would you take it?

If you did you'd be making a big mistake. The chances are that you would be wiped out before we even got close to 1000 flips because getting five consecutive flips in a row that are all heads or all tails is going to happen and you would run out of money before you had a chance to win it all back again.

For this same reason this is why the martingale roulette strategy does not work.

If you have not heard of the martingale then it works by placing a bet on Red or Black to win and then doubling the bet each time you lose until you win. The problem is that long streaks of Reds or Blacks do happen and so you always end up having to place a bet larger than the house will allow to win back your original stake.

Never going bust is your goal and to do that you have to bet a small portion of your bankroll on each bet. If you think this is going to be boring then sports' betting is probably not for you. To be successful at it requires a disciplined approach but the advantage is that you will never go broke – now you can call yourself a gambler without ever ending up in the gutter and drinking super strength lager.

So now that we have the financial discipline out of the way let's turn to the second facet we need to be successful – getting the best price.

Adding free sports bets; account bonuses and reload bonuses to your account is an important part of your strategy but getting the best price for your bet is the most important. You may be making small gains by shopping around but when you add up the money saved over twelve months by getting the best price then it can become quite a sizeable chunk of your bankroll. Always get the best price for your bet.

This means you will need to have around ten to fifteen bookmaker accounts to place your bets and take advantage of whoever is offering the best odds.

Sports betting is about pushing small edges and taking advantage of slim odds advantages over and over again. If you don't look for the best price then you are shooting yourself in the foot to begin with.

And lastly, and this is a much underrated tip. Don't put your money into bookmakers that don't have a long history and stable financials.

Until you get to the point where you could afford to lose an account because the bookies goes bust or ceases trading then keep to the mainstream bookies – those with a solid name and solid fundamentals. Bet 365, Betfred, Skybet etc. you get the idea. There are many start up bookies that come and go and until you build your bankroll sufficiently you don't want to be losing a portion of it to fly by night operators.

So to summarise, only bet a small portion of your bankroll on any one bet, much smaller than you would have originally thought, take advantage of bonus offers and free bets and always get the best price.

Don't put your hard earned cash into the less well known operators until you are confident the risks outweigh the rewards.