Tips for Managing Your Sports Betting Bankroll

I want to talk today about how to manage your sports betting bankroll.  I am referring here to your total account, not the specific unit sizes you invest.  You should never wager more than a modest percentage of your account on each of your bets (around 3%), but how big should your actual account be?  What should your initial deposit be, and how much and how often should you add to your account?

Your initial deposit needs to be large enough to fit within the minimum required by your online betting site.  Thankfully, that is typically not a lot of money.  At Titanbet, for example, one of our favourite UK betting sites, the minimum deposit is just £10.  It is also important to check the withdrawal terms and conditions to see if there are any restrictions on the amount you withdraw.  If there is a high minimum withdrawal threshold, you should consider depositing more so that you do not dip beneath it.

Assuming you want to deposit more than the minimum, how much should you actually deposit?  The only real rule of thumb is to only invest what you can afford to lose.  Even if you are pursuing sports betting as a serious investment and hope to one day start a career as a punter, you cannot hope to become a sharp overnight.  For that reason, you should still budget as if you are doing so for entertainment. 

Value the money you invest in your account, but write it off as already lost on the ledger in your mind when you are evaluating other expenses.  In other words, never deposit money you need to pay your bills or pay for other important necessities. 

That same guiding principle should always be your prime consideration when you are thinking of adding to your account.  Are you diverting money away from other needs?  If so, it is best to wait to add to your account.  If you have some extra money you can afford to lose though, you can add it to your account.

It is also important that you never think of depositing money into your account as some kind of a fix for poor performance.  If you are wagering poorly and losing money hand over first, you are only masking the problem by adding continuously to your account and viewing a balance that seems like it has returned to normal.  You must fix your poor strategies and get back to winning, or you will just lose more and more money.

Finally, it is vital that you learn how to frame your betting account contextually with the rest of your financial life.  It is helpful to view it as a discrete entity, something that exists separately from the rest of your finances.  That way you will not shuffle money in and out of it casually (or worse, not define it at all—leading to inconsistency in unit sizes). 

But remember that the decisions you make while betting can still have some impact on the rest of your life.  If you keep financing your account to compensate for your losses, you are feeding into those losses, not creating gains.  If however you learn how to win with consistency, one day you may be able to treat your betting account as a source of income!