Bankroll management, is one of the key skills required to be successful at betting whether it be on horse racing or other sports. Despite this fact there are many aspiring bettors that don’t even understand the importance of good bankroll management, let alone how to do it properly. Without good bankroll management you are likely to go bust sooner rather than later. Those that are serious about consistently making a profit through betting should have a plan of action to manage their bankroll.
Correct bankroll management is in essence really quite simple. By just following a few straightforward rules you can vastly reduce your chances of going bust and ultimately increase your chances of winning money over time. However, although it’s easy to learn how you should be managing your bankroll, actually doing it is a little more difficult. It takes a lot of discipline and self-control, which can be hard when things are going against you.
The inherent problem we have as bettors is that we bet too much in the first place and cannot resist the urge to chase our losses and increase our bet sizes without regard of the bank size to try and recover losses already made, which ultimately ends in disaster and we end losing the lot (going bankrupt).
I’m not going to go through what our actual bankroll size should be for systems or types of bets that we are placing more in just the fact of the bankroll and the actual betting sizes so that whatever we are doing we are not going to go bust unless we go on a massive unexpected losing run ( if that’s the case then I would be changing how I get my selections).
The main reason of bankroll management is to stop us running out of money to bet with. You could say that it’s to ensure we lose our money more slowly, but it will all depend on how good or bad we are at getting selection to bet on. So what we need to do is set ourselves some basic rules based on the amount of money we have to use and the way that we bet. You will also need discipline, but the idea of having rules in place is to make it easier to keep on top of your self control and help you avoid chasing your losses and invariably stop you from over betting when on a winning streak and start over betting.
Now you know what you should be doing lets have a look at basic bankroll management. Now there is no single correct way to manage your bankroll, the important thing is that you have a plan in place.
Step 1:- Bankroll
Firstly you need an amount of money to bet with, which becomes your bankroll. ( this should be an amount that you can afford to lose and should be separate from other monies).
Step 2:- Bet Size
You have to decide how much each bet will be.
Step 3:- Staking Plan
You need to decide whether you will be using level stakes or a variable staking plan.
So now you have the plan for your bankroll I will go through a simple example of how to put the management into place.
Let’s say you have £500 that you can safely afford to bet with, this now become your bankroll.
You decide that your bet sizes will be 1% of your total bank
And lastly you are going to use a level stakes strategy.
Ok we have £500 to bet with and 1% of that is £5 so we know have 100 bets to play with in it’s simplest form and it would take 100 bets to lose your bankroll.
You could simply just bet at £5 per bet and let your bankroll increase slowly but surely ( as long as you have a good selection process)
Another way to use the £500 would to bet 1% of the total bank, that could be done after every bet or it could be done over a period of time. For arguments sake lets go for every 7 days.
So if after 7 day your bankroll has grown to £550 then the next 7 days bets would be £5.50 per bet, If we had been on a bit of a losing run and our bankroll dropped to £450 then your bet would be £4.50 per bet, so whatever our situation we will always have 100 bets before you will go bust.
Providing you stick to your rules it would have to be some almighty losing run to destroy your bankroll totally and on the up side when you are on a winning run your bets sizes go up and so does the bank, you may even decide to withdraw money from your bankroll periodically and if you do you just adjust you bet size accordingly.
Bankroll management is straight forward and as long as have the discipline and the willpower to stick to the rules and you have a decent selection process over the long run you will profit.
As I have said before this is a basic example of bankroll management and there is no hard and fast right or wrong way, as long as there is a way. As long as the strategies, staking plans and selection process is right for you then you should have a long and successful betting campaign.
Just remember Bankroll management is for life not just for Christmas.
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