New Year's Resolution for Bettors: Manage Your Money

Do you dream of betting on sports for a living?  If so, this is the perfect time of the year to start thinking about how you can make improvements which will help you to turn that dream into a tangible goal.  One of the most important steps you can take if you haven’t already is coming up with a plan to manage your money.

Why is a money management plan so vital? 

• It removes an element of randomness from your betting.  If you wildly vary your bet sizes, your win percentage may not end up meaning much.  Imagine for example that you bet four times as much as usual one day and lose it all.  You would have to win four bets at your standard size to make up for just that one loss.  That means four wins would be equal to one loss.  Think how that would offset your win percentage!  Even if you won 57% of your bets, you could still wind up in the red.

• It keeps you honest.  One aspect of varying bet sizes which a lot of punters do not even think about is the why.  If you recently bet big on a wager, why did you do it?  “Because I felt confident in it,” you would probably answer.  That may sound really logical, but think about the flip side for a moment.  Does that mean you do not feel confident in the rest of your wagers?  If so, why are you taking them?  When you vary your bet sizes, it is way too easy to find yourself taking subpar bets and excusing them by wagering less on them and more on others.  When every bet size is exactly the same, you place equal value on all your bets—and equal confidence.  That keeps you honest and should help you notice if you are about to make a mistake.

• It keeps you away from complicated bets.  For example, consider a parlay bet.  This is a series of straight bets.  You need to win all of them in order to win the entire bet and the potentially huge payout that goes with it.  But that means if you lose just one straight bet, you lose all the money you have risked on all the bets.  Parlay bets are incredibly hard to win and most serious punters stay away from them because the risk associated with them is just too high.  If you have a money management plan that confines you to small, consistent bet sizes, that plan would take care of that for you!  You would naturally not bet on a parlay because it would take you outside the limits that your plan imposes.

So this year, come up with a sports betting money management plan.  To get started, see Sports Betting Money Management.  Once you have a plan in place, you can get on your way to seeing some consistent returns in your betting account.