When people start their journey on online betting in Malaysia and Singapore, it is often highlighted that having in-depth knowledge on the games or sports they want to wager on are key to becoming profitable and successful in sports betting.
However, another key gambling principle is often forgotten – money management. It can be just as important as researching and knowing the betting options to achieve success and profitability. Proper handling of your betting funds can help you maximise your profit potential. Consequently, mishandling your betting money can cause you to face financial consequences.
Bankroll Management in Online Gambling
Bankroll refers to the total amount of money you have set aside for betting, and bankroll management (BRM) is the practice of properly managing your gambling money. Effective allocation of your bankroll in all of your gambling activities can ensure that you can keep participating in betting events even during a losing streak.
Advantages of Bankroll Management
Bankroll management helps you set specific rules with your betting activities, specifically with the amount of wager you can place. But aside from ensuring that you gamble within your means, effectively managing your bankroll has more benefits to your gambling career.
- It ensures that you stay disciplined with your betting funds and activities;
- It limits you from staking too much;
- It prevents you from chasing losses; and,
- It allows you to survive a couple of losses.
Ways to Implement Proper Bankroll Management
The simplest way to ensure proper management of your bankroll is to decide how much money you will use for online gambling. This should be a completely separate fund and should not overlap with the money you are using to pay your bills and live your life.
Accordingly, you have to establish a betting unit based on your bankroll. This will help determine how much of your bankroll is used on each wager you will be placing— generally, the recommended betting unit when gambling is 1 to 2 per cent of your entire bankroll.
Nonetheless, you can also employ other effective money management and staking strategies to maximise your betting budget, increase potential wins, and limit possible losses. Here are two ways to manage your funds better:
Pareto Principle
The Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, the principle of factor sparsity, or the law of the vital few, is derived from Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto’s publication in 1896. In his journal titled “Cours d’économie politique,” Pareto included his most criticised law of income distribution, which is a complicated mathematical formulation he used to attempt to prove that the distribution of wealth in Italy is not random. And upon presenting the complex mathematical formulation, Pareto observed that about 80% of the country’s wealth or land belonged to just 20% of the population.
This principle has become popular across different fields, including the betting industry. In general, the Pareto Principle states that approximately 80% of efforts come from 20% of the causes for many outcomes.
In betting, the 80/20 rule comes into play when deciding which of your betting markets, odds, and sports bring you an enormous value when gambling. It is ideal for focusing 80% of your bankroll, time, and effort on the 20% of most profitable betting types and strategies. Then, the remaining 20% of your bankroll can be spent experimenting with new techniques and wagering on new betting markets.
Kelly Criterion
The Kelly Criterion is a mathematical formula created by American scientist John Kelly to analyse the effect of long-distance telephone signal noise issues in information transmitted over networks. Kelly’s method was published in 1965 as “A New Interpretation of Information Rate” and became popular among investors – it helped them decide how much to invest in a given project.
Soon after, the gambling community also realised the Kelly Criterion’s potential as an optimal money management system for sports betting. You can use this mathematical equation for your staking plan to calculate the amount of money you can wager (relative to the size of your bankroll) on a betting event.
Using the Kelly Criterion as one of your betting strategies is to help you know when to bet and not to bet and determine how much of your bankroll you should wager. It recommends that you wager higher amounts on betting odds with a higher probability of winning and stake lower amounts on odds with a lower likelihood of winning. Doing this can help you boost your overall winnings and prevent you from losing a big chunk of your bankroll in one go.
The Kelly Criterion has several versions, but the most used in sports betting is:
f = [(b x p) – q) / b
f is the fraction of the bankroll you will use for your bet
b is the decimal odds of your prospective bet (odds – 1)
p is your estimated probability of winning
q is the estimated probability of losing (1 – p)
For instance, you will be placing a bet on a match between Manchester United and Real Madrid, and you guess that Real Madrid has a 60% chance of winning the game and at odds of 2.00.
So, the calculation is:
f = [ (1 x 0.60) – 0.40 ] / (2 – 1)
f = (0.60 – 0.40) / 1
f = 0.20 / 1 = 0.20
This means that it is suggested that you spend 20% of your bankroll for your wager for Real Madrid.
Conclusion
Bankroll management is crucial regardless of whether you are gambling for fun or profit. Properly handling your betting funds can ensure that you effectively allocate your money on every game or betting event you want to participate in. This helps reduce the risk of losing money too quickly and increases your chances of success with your gambling journey.
But apart from implementing money management strategies, you also have to avoid committing the most common mistakes when betting to prevent yourself from losing the money you cannot afford to lose.
Read More: 6 Best Roulette Betting Strategies
Where to start your gambling journey?
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