How to Manage Your Bankroll?

Posted by Harry Kane on Friday, February 15, 2019

There’s no doubt that the remote gambling sector represents a huge business in the UK, with the GGY for this marking peaking at £5.4 billion in March 2018. This represented a 13.7% increase on the previous year’s figures, while it offers an insight into how much money is wagered by punters during each 12-month period.

The money wagered by gamblers is drawn from what’s commonly referred to as their bankroll, and this plays a central role in their success or failure online. More specifically, the effective management of your bankroll enables you to get the most of your capital, while also making it possible to prioritise bets that offer the best value proposition.

In this article, we’ll explore this idea further, while appraising the actionable steps that you can take to successfully manage your bankroll.

1. Ask Yourself “What’s in a Bankroll”?

While we’ve already offered a broad definition of the term ‘bankroll’, it’s important to drill down deeper into this and understand how it relates to casino gameplay and sports betting.

The money in your bankroll will be used to fund individual bets and stakes, while the total amount that you commit to spend will be influenced by several different factors. These include the precise markets that you operate in, the frequency of your bets and the predetermined amount of cash that you can afford to lose each month.

With these points in mind, it’s imperative that you approach to bankroll management from an informed and strategic perspective. This means organising your capital into monthly instalments and identifying roughly how many bets or stakes you intend to make in this period, as this ensures that you spread your money wisely and efficiently over time.

So while you must also judge each individual bet on its own individual merits, organising your bankroll means that you’ll minimise the risk of exhausting your capital across a small number of wagers.

We’d also recommend that you manage your initial expectations when starting out, either as someone who is new to gambling or an individual who’s applying a bankroll management strategy for the first time. This enables you to develop your skills and hone your management strategy gradually, without putting too much of your hard-earned cash at risk.

On a similar note, you should make a small cash commitment to your bankroll when starting out. While you may have a burning desire to chase big returns, it’s important to remember that bankrolls are most effectively used to generate small but incremental returns over time.

2. Strategise and Consider the Odds When Sports Betting

When you first begin to manage your bankroll, you may be encouraged to stake a constant percentage of your capital on each wager or betting unit.

While this may enable you to spread your bankroll across the desired number of bets and minimise losses, however, it fails to respect the odds associated with a specific wager and the value proposition on offer to punters.

Instead, it assumes an equal value for every single bet that you place while preventing you from tailoring your stake to suit the odds and probability of each selected outcome.

It’s far preferable to consider the odds and the underlying value proposition of a bet before you set your stake, but the challenge here is achieving this while also spreading your bankroll over a predetermined number of wagers.

Fortunately, there’s a rudimentary formula that can be used to help strike this balance, especially if you’re looking to succeed in the field of sports betting.

(£1000 * 0.05) / (11.00 -1) = 5

In the example laid out here, we’re assuming that you wager 5% (£50) of your £1000 bankroll as a default measure and standard betting unit.

Now, if you back an outcome at 2/1, the betting unit will remain fixed at £50. As we can see, however, odds of 11/1 will alter the equation, by reducing your stake to just £5 in order to reflect the value of the wager, your chances of winning and the potential returns.

By enabling you to set a standard betting unit and adapt this according to the relevant value proposition, you’re creating a structure in which your bankroll can be managed easily and efficiently across several disciplines.

It also helps you to realise the value of individual bets and their respective odds, although you’ll need to bear in mind that the implementation of this strategy requires proactive management and a certain amount of common sense.

3. Adjust your Strategy for Different Disciplines and Multiple Bets

Let’s face facts; even the best-laid bankroll strategies can go awry. The reason for this is simple; as the effectiveness of standard strategies varies across different disciplines and marketplaces.

Not only this, but strategies can also fail to account for the placement of multiple sports bets simultaneously, causing you to exhaust your bankroll during the course of a single sitting.

When looking to deploy your capital across both casino gameplay and sports betting, one option is to separate bankrolls for each discipline. So while your standard betting unit may remain the same across both bankrolls, you can manage your cash more efficiently and make it easier to leverage variable strategies.

If you want to play games like roulette or blackjack, for example, you’ll also need to determine whether or not to adopt a positive, negative or neutral betting system. There are pros and cons to each of these options, but for gamblers with smaller resources and a desire to manage their bankroll effectively we’d recommend either increasing your stake with each win (positive progression) or maintaining the same betting unit throughout.

After all, negative progression strategies increase your stake with each loss and can quickly exhaust your bankroll, especially during games of chance such as roulette.

In terms of placing multiple sports bets, there’s a risk that your preferred selections could require a cumulative stake that exceeds 100% of your bankroll. This may either force you to abandon some selections or increase your bankroll, neither of which is a desirable or sustainable option.

To avoid this, you should consider reducing your standard betting unit by a fixed percentage. Whether this is 25% or 50%, it creates a scenario where you can reduce your individual stakes without compromising the fundamental principles of your strategy.

Even as a general rule, we’d recommend keeping your standard betting unit to a minimum, as this creates far greater flexibility in terms of placing multiple wagers and realising the full potential of your bankroll.