Obviously you are using your hard earned cash to bet with. So it is important to stop and think about the financials of betting.
You are putting everything at risk, not the bookmaker, so it is up to
you to keep your finances in check. This is where, one of the biggest
beginner betting tips that can be offered involves money and that is
build yourself a ‘bankroll’. Don’t gamble with the moment that has been
set aside to pay the electric bill, instead have a separate betting bankroll aside
from what you need in your daily life. Keep those two areas of your
life separate. When you have set yourself your bankroll, then plan your
betting accordingly, by week, month or even daily. But however you
distribute your bankroll, never spend more than it.
Limit yourself
Before you even look at a betting site, you need to have your betting
finances in place. Why? Because then you can clearly see what you have
and how to distribute it. With knowing how much you have to spend let’s
say in a month, you can then formulate a betting plan for that month.
For example, this month you know that you have £50 to bet with. That is
all that you can afford to lose. So you can then split that up to
around £1.6 per day or have four betting weekends of £12.50. There is
your betting budget but of course, here comes the part about discipline.
There's no point making yourself a betting budget if you aren’t going to stick to it. The two main downfalls which contribute to losses in sports betting are:
Increasing stakes after a win because of elevated confidence
Panic betting to try and compensate for a loss
Both of these scenarios involve the punters moving away from their
betting plan. Yes, a betting plan. Not only do you need to budget
yourself, but you need to know where to put those funds towards.
So if you have planned for just one bet per day and that bet happens to
lose, don’t break your routine by placing a second bet. There are more
days to come, you will get wins on the board. Stick to your plan, that
can’t be stressed enough, so we’ll just say it again. Stick to your
plan and betting stakes formulas can help you do that!
Betting Stakes explained
You will see it repeated over and over again in our betting guide, have
a betting plan. From money to betting strategy, have a plan! Money
management is so important in order to stay in control and a staking
plan can help out a lot. There are so many different systems which you
could use. From your budget, you could always play the same stake
on every bet or look at variable bets. The latter can be done with
staking formulas. Let’s say that you put £5 each on Serena Williams,
Maria Sharapova and Simona Halep to win Wimbledon. If Williams was so
short of a price that even if she won, it wouldn’t cover the extra £10
put out on the other two players, there’s no point. So why not shuffle
your stake, say £10 on Williams, £3 Sharapova and £2 Halep. Why?
Well, this depends on market prices of course. But if now the returns
from Williams winning covers the stakes on the other two players, plus if the stake balance is right,
if either Sharapova or Halep won at their respective longer prices,
then they would also cover the outlay on Williams. This is just adapting your same funds for betting value by percentaging out your stakes. There is a simple formula to explain this and it is:
Expected Profit/Odds = Resulting Stake
Let’s explain that out. Williams is 2.0, Sharapova is 4.0 and Halep is 6.0 decimal odds and you are looking to win £100.
So for your total outlay of £91.60 you know that as long as one of them wins, you are guaranteed at least a £8.40 profit,
including covering your stakes on the other players. This is an example
of how to bet on favourites in a tournament with a little bit of
lateral thinking. Again, it is money management planning. It can’t be
emphasized enough. There are a lot of strategies like this which can make your money go further and can limit losses.
Losses
There is a slightly different approach which you could look at. You could set yourself a maximum stake per day
for example (spread out over different bets) to play with and not touch
any winnings that come back. Whatever your profit/loss is at the end of
the day (hopefully profit) from your set maximum stake then that is
that. However, you could be guided in your limits by losses. What we
mean here is that if you took £50 for the month and decided to give
yourself £1.60 per day to bet with. Let’s say your first bet won at 2/1
and now you have £3.20 for the day. You could then play with what you have earned only
to try and turn that into more profit. You could maybe just bet another
£1.60 for your second bet so that you still have your original starting
fund. Even if after a few bets you ended up with £10 in profit, you
could decide to keep playing as long if you were to lose, you never
lose more than that £1.60 starting figure in your betting fund. So that
is limiting yourself by losses.
Profit Payouts
Another way to form a bit of a budgeting strategy would be to put aside all of the winnings
that you have managed to amass from your set budget. So if you are
playing that daily £1.60 and you played it all on one bet and won. You
could then simply take that profit aside and forget about it, which
eliminates the temptation to play it. Then you could again play that £1.60 stake
in the hope of picking up another bit of profit and keep doing that
until you lose your original stake. So that is taking the profit pay
outs from the original stake for as long as you can. Again, if that is
your daily plan, for example, if the bet loses the first time then don’t borrow from tomorrow’s budget. Simply wait and stick to the plan.
Don’t bet more than you can afford to lose
There is no more sound betting advice available than this. Just don’t bet more than you can afford to lose.
If you can’t afford to lose anything this week, then don’t bet, it’s a
simple as that. Don’t look at betting to try and get yourself out of a
financial hole, it’s not going to work. For most people betting is
about winning the challenge more so than the money. It is being able to
brag about beating the bookmaker, getting some great betting calls
correct. But some people see only the money aspect of things and think that the more they throw at sports betting,
the bigger the reward they are going to get. It doesn’t work like that,
small profits over a long term is how betting should be approached.
It’s important to look at betting from the angle of what you can afford
to lose.
