Sports Betting Bankroll Management

Sports betting as a career or as a secondary source of income requires you to perform some additional tasks to ensure your success. Additional work? Ma’am! Yes, we know; this may not be what you want to hear.

However, if you are serious about sports betting, like winning money, and never want to top up your cash, you should pay attention to what we have for you today.

When you’re betting just for fun and winning isn’t essential to your survival, it doesn’t matter as much as you do things according to the books. However, when you take your betting more seriously, you have to step up your game to make money. Today, we will talk specifically about managing your money.

Bankroll management is the practices and procedures you employ to manage the money you use to make your sports bets. In other words, how much you choose to bet on each game and how you react to winning and losing sessions.

If you don’t have the procedure before starting your betting career, you will be in a world of hurt. You’ll constantly be guessing what’s right, and you’ll end up spending all your money even if you’re the sharpest bettor on the planet.

Part of what makes an elite-level sports bettor is their ability to manage their money. We’re not kidding when we say that the sharpest and smartest bettors on the planet will end up with a bloated stomach if they don’t have excellent bankroll management practices.

This is very important. If you are someone looking to take your betting to the next level, please sit back and look at the information we have for you today. Applying this information will be very important if you want to have a long life in the world of sports betting.

The Importance of Managing Your Sports Betting Bankroll

Before we further manage your money, we want to make sure you fully understand why this is so important. We hope you will be more inclined to comply with the rules and guidelines we provide to you by understanding its importance.

While there is a long list of reasons why bankroll management is essential, there are two main reasons we want to talk to you about today – longevity in this industry and your mental sanity.

Longevity in Industry

Longevity in the industry is an excellent way of saying “how long you’re going to be around.” If you achieve longevity in the sports betting industry, you will last for many years.

Lack of longevity means you fail, lose your money, and move on to something else. Longevity in the industry is the goal.

Achieving this goal depends on two things. First, you have to be good at sports betting and be able to pick a winner. That’s given. Second, you have to manage your money well, or you’ll be out of here soon. Think of it as a business.

Even if a business is very successful, it doesn’t matter if the owners don’t manage their money well. They will eventually close shop and miss out on an excellent opportunity to continue making some serious money.

Mental Sanity

The second reason that bankroll management is essential is to maintain your mental sanity. No, sports betting will not drive you crazy, although some bettors may argue otherwise. We mean your ability to continue to make rational decisions during difficult mental times.

You need to maintain a sense of mental sanity and balance to stay on track when things are going very well or very badly.

The structure provided by bankroll management will do just that. As long as you are disciplined enough to follow the guidelines we provide, you should have no problem when the going gets tough.

What is the right move will be ingrained in you from doing it so often that you will automatically do it when the going gets tough.

This is very similar to military training. They train their soldiers to do things a certain way so that when times are tough in war, they will automatically do what is right. While we won’t be putting any of you through boot camp, we hope to get you ready to do the right thing wherever you are on the emotional roller coaster of sports betting.

Manage Your Money Overall

The first step in the bankroll process is to manage your overall bankroll. This is not the amount you want to bet on this weekend’s game or the amount you want to bet on next week’s game. Your total bankroll is the amount of money you want to completely set aside from your daily fund to be used solely for sports betting from now on until forever.

This is money that you will never touch or use for anything other than sports betting.

The best way to think about your money is like investing in a company. When you invest in a company, you give them your money, and then you don’t see the money until you receive a profit based on a predetermined payment schedule. If the company needs more money or wants to reinvest the money, that is a decision you have to make.

Your money for sports betting should be looked at in precisely the same way. Decide how much money you want to commit to sports betting and separate it from the rest of your money. Make sure that this amount of money isn’t something you’ll need to pay bills or anything like in the future.

The idea is that you don’t have to invest any more money into sports betting again unless you decide you want to grow your bankroll manually, which we’ll cover later.

So, how much should you put in your initial bankroll?

Well, it will be up to you and what your current situation is. The biggest thing to remember is not to put in money that you don’t want to lose.

Sports betting is more difficult than many people think, and the chances of you losing money are very real. We will do our best to help you prevent it, but you should be aware that it is possible.

Keep in mind that this may mean your money isn’t as big as you’d like it to be. It does not matter. In the next section, we’ll cover the various methods you can take to grow your money.

For now, focus on entering an amount that you’re comfortable losing if things don’t go according to plan. Remember, this is not an amount you will bet right away. This is not an amount you should immediately top up if things don’t go well. We plan to teach you to make this money last and hopefully use it to make a profit.

Many novice bettors start with a few hundred dollars ($100-$500). More experienced bettors or knowledgeable sports fans sometimes begin with a slightly higher bracket with a $500-$2,500 bankroll. If you have a lot of disposable income or are already a bettor who wants to take things more seriously, you can start with a $2500+ bankroll.

In reality, it doesn’t matter what number you start with, as long as you can make many bets with the amount you put in your bankroll. We’ll also cover the many ways to grow your money later, so if it’s not at the level you want it to be by the end, that’s okay too.

Read the following section on individual bet amounts and work backward if you’re unsure where to start. As we outline the different routes you can take, you’ll be able to see how much you might need in your money for the route you want to take.

Individual Bet Amount

We want to talk now about choosing a size for your bet. The amount you bet will depend on two things – how much risk you are willing to take and how confident you are in your choice.

By analyzing risk in relation to the size of your bankroll, you will be able to develop a range in which you can bet. Where you choose to bet within that range will depend on your betting strategy and your confidence in the value of your selection.

Let’s start by looking at the three different risk profiles you can assume and where your maximum and range bets will fall for each.

How to Grow Your Money

Since we’re on the topic of growing your money, let’s talk about the various ways you can go about it. Sometimes when you start sports betting, you may not want to risk as much as you want to in the end, or you may not have as much cash as you would like to spend.

All of this is fine, and we commend you for not pushing yourself too hard. Sports betting is never going anywhere, so there’s no need to rush and potentially cause yourself to fail. If you don’t want to risk too much, there’s also an option to go for the initial offers of betting that give you a push and sense of confidence that your bets are working. Maybe this will help you in the long run but make sure you use them wisely.

There are two main ways to grow your sports betting bankroll – manual additions and reinvesting profits. Let’s look at both.

Manual Add

Manual addition to your bankroll refers to you adding cash to your bankroll. It’s not money you win or anything like that. This is you take money out of your daily account and move it to your bankroll. One thing a lot of people do is schedule manual additions. For example, some people who want to grow their money faster than just their profits will decide on a certain amount to put in on a weekly or monthly basis.

Maybe you decide to take $25 off each of your paychecks and add it to your bankroll. Or perhaps you get a bonus from work, and you decide you want to put some of it into your sports betting bankroll.

This is an example of manual addition. Make sure you don’t accidentally calculate it as a profit when you record it in your tracking spreadsheet. You want to make sure that you are accurately tracking your wins and losses.

Reinvest Profit

The second option you have for growing your money is to reinvest your profits. This is a low-risk method, as it requires you to win to increase your reel size. It also forces you to lower your bet size if you lose.

Reinvesting your profits means taking the money you have won above your initial bankroll mark and adding it back to your bankroll during the reset time instead of withdrawing it. You have to decide what percentage of your profits you will reinvest and what percentage you will take.

You also need to figure out where you ultimately want your bankroll to be. You may not want to keep growing your money forever, so find out where you want it to end up. You can work backward with your bet size and risk profile here, too, if you prefer.

Typically, we see people reinvesting 100% of their profits until they reach their desired bankroll size or 50/50 split. With division, they take half of the money they earned from their money token as profit and then reinvested the other half.

Things to Watch Out for

The last thing we want to talk about today is the potential threat to your money. These are factors that are part of life that you need to be aware of and protect yourself and your money from.

Theft and Loss

When you bet on sports at the local book, you are forced to carry a lot of money. When you cash out a winning ticket, you are forced to carry a lot of cash. This puts you at risk of potentially being robbed or losing your money.

Criminals know that people in sportsbooks usually have vast sums of money, which makes you and everyone else in the book. Do you think losing the game will hurt your profits? Imagine if most of your money magically disappeared because it was lost or stolen.

This is one of the main reasons why we advocate online betting. You are never asked to move large sums of money on your person.

This eliminates much of the risk you have when you bet in a brick-and-mortar setting.

There are still risks with online betting that you need to be aware of. If someone gets your hands on your account, they can try to get the money out. Fortunately, online sites have safeguards against this, but you certainly don’t want to take any risks. Protect your password and make sure you log out of your account when you are done placing bets.

Controlling Your Emotions

The biggest threat to your bankroll is probably you. If you get emotional a lot, you want to make sure that you never let that influence the bets and decisions you make. One of the greatest times of vulnerability is when you are on a losing streak.

Losing lines in sports betting is inevitable. No matter how sharp you are, you will go through some rough patches where it feels like you can’t pick the right game to save your life.

These are the times when you need to be strong and make sure to stick to your strategy. This means you have to make sure that you don’t choose the game emotionally. This also means that you need to make sure not to chase your losses by betting more on games you don’t trust or betting more than your maximum bet amount.

You need to be honest with yourself if you struggle with allowing your actions to affect your emotions negatively. Note that even if you win an out-of-character bet, that doesn’t mean that it’s true. You are out of your strategy means you have something that you need to fix right away.

You can’t claim it’s true just because it works. It’s easy to get results-oriented in sports betting, but it’s a bad and unhealthy habit to get into.

Substance Abuse

We are not here to dampen your fun. We’re not going to tell you that you shouldn’t drink or do whatever you like while watching a game. We will say that if any of these affect the way you bet, you will need to make adjustments.

We’ve heard way too many stories about sports bettors getting too drunk or drunk and ending up betting more than they wanted or betting on games they never wanted to.

There’s nothing wrong with having fun while you’re betting, but once it starts to affect your bets, it’s time for something to change.

Either you need to stop the sauce, or you have to make sure you can’t place a bet while you’re drunk. Remember, if you want to take your bets seriously, sometimes it will require you to take the “less fun way.”

Big picture

Managing your money correctly is one of the essential skills you should learn and apply if you have any hope of making it long-term as a sports bettor. It’s not that hard; it just requires some basic knowledge (which we have provided here) and some discipline from you.

We highly recommend implementing your bankroll management rules before you even make your first bet. That way, you can be sure that you will have a good practice and be prepared for any situation that you may encounter.