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Bankroll management is one of the most important tenets of sports betting, especially in an age where online gambling is prevalent. In the digital realm, online sportsbooks are constantly at your fingertips, while in-play wagering unlocks potentially thousands of props across the NFL, NBA and MLB. Simply put, bankroll management is a key sports betting strategy for any bettor.
By prioritizing money management in sports betting, you can simultaneously look to minimize loss while optimizing potential returns. But what exactly do we mean by bankroll management, and how can you put this into practice online?
What is Bankroll Management?
If you’re wondering, “What is a bankroll in betting?” This describes the amount of money that you set aside for sports wagering. Typically, you’ll deposit this into your chosen sportsbook account, creating a fixed sum to bet with during a specified timeframe.
‘Bankroll management’ simply refers to the subsequent organization and deployment of this money, ensuring that you have enough to cover your desired bets without ever wagering outside of your financial means.
Because of this, effective bankroll management solves the perennial issue of responsible gambling, which can affect bettors of all ages and experience levels. It also helps to introduce order and strategy when betting on unpredictable sports events, especially in calculating stake amounts using the odds and implied probability of a particular outcome occurring.
Is Bankroll Management Important?
Sports betting bankroll management is a fundamental principle of successful sports wagering, and one that’s fully embraced by professional and profitable bettors. So, it makes sense that amateurs and novices should also prioritize bet management, as part of a much broader wagering strategy.
Arguably, understanding bankroll management in sports betting is even more important for inexperienced bettors, who may be at a competitive disadvantage in the marketplace. Here are some of the reasons why carefully managing your bankroll and stake amounts is so important:
- Minimize the Risk Posed by Emotive Betting: Emotive betting is highly problematic in sports wagering, as inexperienced bettors may start out by backing their favorite team or players. While picking match winners or outcomes based on tribal support isn’t recommended, however, bankroll management at least helps to cap your losses at an amount you can comfortably afford.
- Create a More Even Playing Field: Whether you’re a seasoned or inexperienced bettor, you’re always at a disadvantage when wagering at online sportsbooks. This is because of how bets are structured and outcomes are priced, while sites also apply a commission (or vigorish) to ensure nominal profits. However, by using a bankroll management strategy, you can minimize long-term losses while establishing optimal unit bets and stake amounts.
- Avoid the Perils of Irresponsible Gambling: We’ll touch more on the practical elements of sports betting bankroll management below, but this essentially affords you some level of control over your money and gambling activity. By initially setting aside a sum of money that you can comfortably afford to lose, you can continue to wager freely while avoiding the pitfalls of irresponsible betting. This is arguably one of the most important factors in favor of disciplined bankroll management.
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How does Betting Bankroll Management Work?
The really good news is that bankroll management in sports betting is relatively straightforward. In fact, successful bankroll management depends largely on your ability to adhere to a predetermined set of rules and wager in a disciplined manner at all times. Here’s a brief overview of the rules and mechanics that underpin bankroll management.
- Set your bankroll at an amount that you can comfortably afford to lose
- Ensure that this covers a fixed period of time or season duration
- Calculate your average unit bet to create a typical, single stake amount
- Refine your stakes for each selection according to your analysis of the odds and implied probability
- Track your bets and their performance to derive insights for the future
How to Manage a Sports Betting Bankroll
Now that you have a broad understanding of how sports betting bankroll management works, it’s time to drill down deeper into the finer points and principles. Each of these are key to successfully managing your bankroll over an extended period of time.
Determining the Size of Your Bankroll
As we’ve touched on, your bankroll should never exceed an amount of money that you can comfortably afford to lose. Of course, this will vary from one person to another, based on your incomings and outgoings, but it’s important to ensure that your bankroll never puts your financial security or solvency at risk.
You can also take steps to boost the size of your bankroll without putting yourself at the risk of financial harm. For example, you can use welcome bonuses and free bet offers to create fixed amounts of free play when you register for an account, while ensuring that the wagering requirements associated with each promotion don’t force you to bet outside your means.
Understanding a ROI in Sports Betting
ROI stands for ‘Return on Investment’, and is a broad financial term that’s in widespread use. In the case of sports betting, ROI provides a measure of how much your bankroll has increased during a predetermined period of time, while it can also be used to describe your level of return on a single wager.
This is an excellent measure of whether you’re placing good or bad bets, while it may also highlight issues surrounding individual stake amounts and the odds at which you wager. We’d recommend that you measure ROI during the period of time that your bankroll covers, whether this is monthly or the course of the regular NBA season.
Betting in Units
A unit bet is a measure that’s used to standardize sports wagering performance, and it may be expressed as either a dollar or percentage value. You can usually calculate your unit bet by dividing your total bankroll by the number of wagers that you’d like to place during a particular season or event, while using this to inform your betting strategy.
For example, let’s say that you establish a bankroll of $2000 for the 2024/25 NFL regular season. You would simply divide this by the number of gameweeks ($2000 / 18) to create a weekly budget of $111.11, which can then be divided further by the precise number of matches that you choose to bet on.
This creates an average unit bet that can be adjusted depending on your choice of market and the associated odds.
When dealing with percentage terms, you should broadly aim to create individual betting units that are between 1% and 5% of your bankroll. However, it’s rare to see professional and successful bettors wager more than 1% of their bankroll on a single event, so aim to cap units at no more than 3%.
Evaluate Your Bankroll Often
We’ve already discussed the importance of regularly evaluating the ROI produced by individual bets and your bankroll.
However, you should also review and analyze your sports betting bankroll in relation to other factors, such as your wider financial circumstances, the deployment of bonus offers and any profits that you’ve been able to bank.
In some instances, you may be able to incrementally increase your bankroll, so long as this remains within your broader financial means. However, you may also have to reduce your bankroll in some instances, such as a reduction in income or rise in your general cost of living.
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Bankroll Management Sports Betting Strategies
Successful money management in sports betting involves a number of different strategies. Some of these are quite complex and widely used by professional bettors, while others are more suited to beginners!
Confidence Models
‘Confidence’ feels like a strange word to use in the context of sports betting, where outcomes are largely unpredictable and impacted by several different variables.
However, this model encourages you to increase your unit bet in games where you feel more confident about the outcome, whether this is the result of your analysis or the odds that have been provided by sportsbooks.
Let’s say that Manchester United are priced at 5/9 to beat Fulham in the Premier League. However, your analysis of United’s current form and Fulham’s poor performance on the road (allied with their absence of key players) may make you think that the Reds Devils should have an even shorter price. So, you may increase your stake amount or introduce spread betting to pursue much higher returns.
In this case, your initial betting unit will remain unchanged. However, you could look to multiply this by two, three or even five units under the guise of the confidence model, which is often preferred by experienced sports bettors.
Kelly Criterion Model
While the Kelly Criterion model is now synonymous with financial trading and investment, it actually started out as a system for gambling and sports betting. It’s used to determine the optimal amount of money to commit to a single wager, while there’s even an equation to help calculate this for sports betting:
F = (BP – Q) / B
In this instance, ‘F’ refers to the bet sized based on a percentage of your total bankroll. ‘B’ is the wager’s decimal odds -1, while ‘P’ represents the implied probability of your wager being successful. Finally, ‘Q’ is the probability of your bet losing, which is usually expressed as 1 – P.
For example, let’s say that you fancied Liverpool to defeat Chelsea in the Carabao Cup final at odds of 1.82. This implies a 55% probability of a win for the Reds, while the chances of your bet being unsuccessful are 45% as the draw is not a consideration here. This equation will read as follows:
0.0012 = (0.82*0.55 – 0.45) / 0.82
You can then multiply 0.0012 by 100 to create a unit bet worth just 0.12% of your total bankroll. In this instance, you should either consider incrementally reducing your average stake or wagering no more than a single unit bet. Of course, if your analysis reveals that the actual probability of a Red’s win is higher, you can increase your stake accordingly.
Flat Betting
This is the most straightforward sports betting bankroll management strategy, and one that simply requires you to set an initial betting unit and not deviate from this. This essentially means that you’ll stake the same amount on each match or outcome, regardless of confidence levels, odds and your own form analysis.
So, you would wager the same amount whether you’re backing a 1.50 favorite or 7.00 underdog. For example, if your single betting unit was $5 and you successfully backed a 1.50 outcome, you’d bank a total return of $7.50 (inclusive of your stake). However, placing a winning $5 bet on a 7.00 underdog will see you earn $35.00 in total.
In some cases, you may decide to factor in the sportsbook’s vigorish into your flat betting strategy. This is especially true when backing heavy betting favorites with American odds of -110, as you’ll need to incrementally increase your unit bet to 1.1 if you’re to win 1.0.
Regardless, the goal here is to keep your betting unit as consistent as possible and avoid incurring considerable losses. This strategy is focused on minimizing losses over time, even at the expense of potentially higher and increased returns.
Percentage Betting
The percentage betting model is similar to the flat wagering strategy. In fact, the only tangible difference here is that you set betting units according to the size of your bankroll, which is liable to fluctuate over time. However, you won’t factor in any alternative considerations.
Let’s say that you have $1000 left in your bankroll and are halfway through the NFL season. Your unit bet is 2.5% of this sum ($25), and your next wager wins at odds of 2.00. This immediately boosts your bankroll to $1050, and 2.5% of this sum will now be $26.50.
The main advantage of this strategy is that it enables you to capitalize on wins and increase your unit bets in a responsible manner. However, it also requires you to regularly recalibrate and calculate your bankroll, while a succession of losses can significantly reduce the amount you have to wager over time.
Bankroll Management Tips from Our Sports Betting Experts
Bankroll management in sports betting is certainly key to your long-term success as a bettor, while there are various strategies to help you minimize losses and negate the risk of problem gambling. So, we’ve prepared some expert sports betting bankroll tips to help you make the most of your budget!
Avoid Betting on Bad Lines
Maximizing your bankroll in sports betting may depend in part on your ability to distinguish between good and bad betting lines. Remember, not all lines are created equal, as while some offer inherent value, others may be priced erroneously and in a way that makes wagering prohibitive.
To start evaluating betting lines, use the odds to calculate the implied probability of one or more outcomes occurring.
Sportsbooks use this calculation to help set odds in the first place, using a combination of detailed form analysis, head-to-head data and similar metrics. So, you can use the same calculation to estimate probability and see how this measures against your own game insights.
Over time, you can also measure your bets against the ‘closing line value’ (CLV) metric. This tells you whether you’ve wagered at odds that are superior to the closing price (beaten the market), or achieved a negative CLV by failing to bet at optimal odds.
Stop Yourself from Chasing Losses
We’ve already touched on how disciplined bankroll management can help you to avoid emotive wagering in sports betting markets. Emotive betting is at the other end of the spectrum to smart and insightful wagering, whether you blindly back your favorite team to win or respond to losses by recklessly increasing your subsequent stake amounts.
Make no mistake; chasing your losses is both harmful and irresponsible, while it puts your bankroll at risk and may encourage you to wager outside of your means.
Chasing losses can be built on an erroneous belief that there’s some order in winning and losing streaks. However, each sports betting event and match is a completely individual entity, and one in which there are variable probabilities, odds and deterministic factors in play. So, even if you endure a series of losses, there’s no guarantee that your luck will suddenly take a turn for the better.
It’s far better to accept loss as an inevitable part of sports betting, while adhering to your unit bet size and wider bankroll management strategy as closely as possible.
Stick to Your Budget and Only Bet What You Can Afford to Lose
The main risk of chasing losses is that it encourages you to either wager more frequently or increase your stake amounts. Over time, this could cause you to bet outside of your financial means, breaking the single most important rule of bankroll management in the process.
Remember, your bankroll should over include a finite amount of money that you can comfortably afford to lose, ideally within a specified period of time. Whether this is a week, month or the duration of a competition, the amount you wager should be determined by your incoming, outgoings (and wider financial circumstances).
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