Understanding the Art of Bankroll Management

Posted by Harry Kane on Tuesday, April 12, 2022

Whenever you refer to a guide on remote betting or online gambling, you’ll invariably find a section on bankroll management. However, despite this being one of the most important aspects of successful and responsible gambling, it’s also often misunderstood or underestimated by bettors across the board.

In simple terms, bankroll management refers to the process of maximising and distributing the funds that you have to wager online. On a macro level, this involves establishing a fixed amount of income that you’re able to wager with for a predetermined amount of time, whereas micro level bankroll management will see you set individual stakes per single game or bet.

In this article, we’re going to discuss the art of bankroll management in greater detail and by considering some of it most important steps. This way, you can hopefully make the most of the capital that you gamble with and minimise losses over an extended period of time.

#1. Never Wager More Than You Can Comfortably Afford to Lose

Your starting point should always be to create an initial bankroll, which should ideally cover a fixed period of time. Typically, this means determining how much you’re able to wager during a month, week or a single day, depending on your income, how frequently you’re paid and patterns that you display when wagering your hard-earned cash.

When determining precisely how much you intend to wager within your desired timeframe, the single most important rule to follow is that you should never wager more than you can comfortably afford to lose. This is a critical principle of responsible gambling too, as it prevents you from chasing losses and wagering outside of your means at all times.

Of course, it’s crucial that you adhere to your set bankroll and avoid the temptation to spend more than this amount at all times. This will require discipline and focus, while we’d also recommend that you plan your wagering activity in advance and use a sporting calendar to organise your wagers when engaging in remote betting.

#2. Make Provision for Your Winnings

Of course, the primary benefit of online gambling is that you’re able to win money, and some punters choose to reinvest any money that they generate through their wagers back into their bankroll. However, this is fraught with risk, especially if begin to lose discipline and focus and end up wagering recklessly.

This doesn’t mean that you can’t commit winnings (or a percentage of your winnings) to your bankroll and increase the amount that you wager, of course, but the key is to factor in any payouts that you earn and create a plan for how to utilise this additional cash. This makes it much easier to manage your bankroll even if it continues to fluctuate, while the risk of overspending can be negated completely.

If you decide to commit your winnings to your bankroll, be sure to keep an accurate tally of exactly how much you’ve won and add this to your starting bankroll. If you’d prefer to separate any winnings that you accrue from your bankroll, be sure to withdraw these immediately from your online betting account and make sure that the funds are transferred to a savings account.

You may even prefer to retain a fixed percentage of your winnings as ‘profit’ and reinvest the remainder into your bankroll. This requires slightly more proactive and careful bankroll management, as you’ll need to set a predetermined percentage that you want to realise as profit and set this aside as soon as you transfer your winnings.

#3. Manage Your Emotions and Expectations

There’s a significant crossover between gambling and investment, particularly as the risk of loss remains omnipresent and tangible at all times. This is especially true when playing games of chance such as online slots and roulette, as you’ll have no control over randomly generated outcomes and can only hope to minimise losses through the deployment of consistent betting strategies.

From a psychological perspective, it’s crucial that you understand this and recognise that there’s no discernible pattern to online gambling results. This, in turn, enables you to manage your expectations and cope with the peaks and troughs of online gambling, while hopefully avoiding the pitfalls of emotive wagering and responses.

One of the key challenges comes after you’ve incurred a series of losses. Remember, it’s a common gamblers’ fallacy that wins and losses will even themselves out over time when wagering online, as statistically speaking you’ll have just as much chance of losing 10 consecutive roulette spins than alternating evenly between wins and losses during an iGaming session.

In instances where you have incurred a series of losses, you may find yourself feeling overly emotional and gripped by a sudden urge to recoup some cash. This should be avoided at all costs, even in circumstances where you’ve used up your bankroll for the designated period. In this case, take a break and wait until you’re able to refresh your bankroll before wagering again!

#4. Keep Detailed Records

We’ve already touched on the importance of keeping records when managing your winnings, but you should adopt a similarly detail-oriented approach when tracking your total spend and how your bankroll is deployed across the board. This should include the amounts that you’ve staked and any subsequent winnings, along with the precise details of the bets and wagers placed.

But what’s the purpose of this? Well, it helps with the practicalities of bankroll management, as you can keep a real-time log of how your money is spent and distributed across an array of different casino verticals and sports betting markets.

Reviewing this information can unlock some invaluable insights, especially in terms of your average stake amount and the average RTP rate you enjoy over time. The latter describes roughly how much you recoup for every £1 wagered online, and you may be able to identify ways of enhancing this as you become more knowledgeable and experienced.