Keeping a Betting Spreadsheet

I have talked in the past about the importance of keeping a betting journal.  In a betting journal, you can write about your wagering experiences, including not only your outcomes, but also your emotions, your strategies, and more.  A betting journal is a valuable tool since it allows you the chance to go back over your past and analyze the decisions you have made.  The insights you get from your journal can help you to come up with smart changes to your strategies, which in turn can lead to greater profits.  But a betting journal can get to be quite complex, and you cannot really take in all that information at a glance.  To that end, it is smart to make a betting spreadsheet as well.

What is a betting spreadsheet?  Simply put, it is like a summary version of your journal, focusing only on your actual wagers, and not everything taking place around them.  You can create a spreadsheet easily in a program like Microsoft Excel. 

What should your betting spreadsheet include?  I would recommend that you create a number of columns.  You should make a column for the type of wager you took, and another for the site where you took the bet (you may discover some sites consistently offer you better deals).  You should put down a brief summary of why you took the wager based on your strategies.  A longer version of the information can go in your journal.  You can then record whether you won or lost your wager, how much you put down on the bet, and how much or little you won or lost.

I also recommend that you set up your spreadsheet to run some simple calculations for you.  You want to figure out how much you are winning or losing on average, what your net gain or loss is, and how many wins and losses you have.  I also recommend calculating your win percentage, which is one of your most important statistics overall, and your win/loss ratio.  Another good statistic to calculate is your net profit divided by your largest loss.  This tells you how many of your largest losses you could sustain before blowing all your profits.  It is a measure of resilience.

If you use the formula functions in Excel, the spreadsheet will automatically update all these statistics as you add new data.  You can use this same spreadsheet system to wager “on paper” before you start wagering with real money.  It is a great tool for testing strategies and improving them, as well as monitoring your live progress. 

By keeping all your information succinct and providing yourself with relevant particulars on your spreadsheet, you make it easy to cross-reference data points between wagers and draw conclusions about your betting.  Match up this information with more detailed reports in your journal for in-depth analysis, and you will be well on your way to improving your wagering strategies and boosting all of your winning statistics.