Learning The In’s and Out’s of Sports Wagering

Sports Betting Basics

A proper sports betting strategy combines many different elements to create an overall system that picks games, preserves the bankroll and wins money in the long run. An entire book could be written on picking games - but for now we’ll just stick to the basics. Besides, if you don’t follow these sports betting basics, you’ll lose all your money no matter how good you are.

Bankroll Management

Your bankroll is obviously the most important part of your sports betting life. If you mismanage your sports betting bankroll, you won’t be a sports bettor for long. The general rule of thumb is to make each bet no larger than 1-2% of your entire bankroll. Big bets will kill your bankroll faster than anything else. Remember, there is no such thing as a sure thing when it comes to even the simplest of sports wagers!

I know 1% sounds tiny but if you follow these guidelines and practice good game selection, your bankroll will grow at a surprising rate. Your bet sizes will increase, which will in turn make your bankroll grow faster, which will in turn make your bet sizes increase - and so on and so forth.

You need to treat your bankroll as seriously as a business treats its inventory. As a sports bettor, you’re in business for yourself - whether you’re full-time or part-time doesn’t matter. What matters is staying in business and turning a profit. Well if you spend your cash, risk it unnecessarily and lose it all, you’re not going to have any inventory left to make a profit.

The Long Term View

To keep yourself sane, you need to take a long term view on sports betting. If you can maintain a 54% advantage (a very respectable advantage), you’re going to experience some sick swings just like poker players do. That’s also why it’s important to keep such a massive bankroll.

Even if you have a 60% advantage over the course of a year, you’ll run into week long losing streaks all the time. You’ll also most likely have a losing month in there somewhere. But that’s ok because you have a deep bankroll and you look to the long term. You’ll have great weeks where you win all your bets and terrible weeks where you lose them all but in the end it all averages out. Don’t let short term results fool you.

It’s easy to get distracted from the long term view if you’re starting out on a small bankroll like most people do. If you have $1,000 to work with and are placing $10 to $20 bets and winning 60% of them, it’s going to feel like you’re taking forever to get anywhere. The key here is to think in terms of percentages, not absolute dollar amounts.

Let’s say you start with that $1,000 bankroll and bust your ass for the first 6 months making 20 bets a week with a 60% winrate. At the end of those 6 months, you step back and look at your results. You might be pleasantly surprised by how much money a 60% winrate is worth over the course of 480 $20 bets. Let’s take a look:

480 Bets

60% Wins = 288 x $20 = $5,760 winning

40% Losses = 192 x $20 = $3,840 losses

Net before commission: +$1,920

Research

Despite what you’ve heard, sports betting is not an easy job. Winning sports bettors are research kings. They pour over past stats, read everything about multiple upcoming games and research the best money lines. It’s a tough job but it’s also highly rewarding.

The problem with sports betting is that you can’t just bet on the teams you know intimately. If you’re making 20 bets a week, that’s four games per day that you need to know inside-out. That’s 80 games a month that you need to have researched well enough to call with a winrate higher than 50%.

If you’re willing to put in the work to do proper research, you’ll find sports betting very rewarding. You’ll make a lot of money doing something most other people only dream about. And if you ever go pro, you’ll have the most beautiful thing of all: freedom.