It really doesn’t matter what form of gambling that you are undertaking to do, your own individual financial situation and attitude to risk will have a huge impact on how you conduct your money management and bankroll requirements. It is exactly the same with staking plans. I have known gamblers in the past that set aside a betting bankroll but were not mentally prepared to accept the losses to that bankroll.
Let me explain a little further, let’s say that you want to try football betting for a living and you set aside a bankroll of £10,000 strictly for that purpose. If you then decide to cancel the enterprise after you suffer initial losses of £2500 purely out of fear of losing the entire £10,000 then strictly speaking you have never had a £10,000 bankroll.
Most gamblers are in this situation even if many of them don’t even know it. The real test of how big your bankroll really is comes when you are taking losses to that bankroll. If in this instance you simply cannot continue because you fear losing the entire 10k then in reality you have not only been using a £2.5k bankroll but you have also been over betting in all probability in relation to your real bankroll because you were betting in such a way as to suggest that your bankroll was 10k when in actual fact you were not prepared to go that far.
This is a chronic mistake to make in gambling because it leads to over betting and this is something that has wiped out thousands upon thousands of gamblers the world over. So you need to understand your risk profile before you even start because this will underpin how you conduct your bankroll management. The way that one person conducts this part of their gambling will be totally different and probably needs to be totally different to the next person because the financial situation and risk profile will be different.
In gambling then it is a common practice for gamblers to adjust their bankrolls in relation to the betting odds of the team or competitor that they are backing. For example, if you are backing at 2.0 on the betting exchanges which is even money and you bet 10% of your bankroll then it is over 1000/1 that your bankroll would be wiped out betting at those prices.
This of course assumes that the prices were genuine prices but the way to grow your bankroll is to find prices that are higher than what they actually should be which isn’t an easy process. During the early days where you may not have a proper feel for accurate prices and odds then I would certainly advise caution. If you are taking prices at around even money then I would not risk any more than 5% of my bank.
I would then push that figure downwards depending on the prices that I was taking. For instance you simply cannot risk 5% of your bank on 10/1 shots or higher because the losing runs at these sorts of prices can be very long indeed. At even money or 2.0 I would make my increments at a cautious 5%.
