Bankroll Management – Successfully Managing Your Betting Funds
Bankroll management is an essential part of safe online gambling and profitable wagering. Following the guidelines of this concept, whether you engage in casino gaming, sports betting, or poker play, will set you up for a far greater online gambling experience.
We introduce you to the principles of bankroll management and show you how to effectively control your online spend and budget for extended online play and a better shot at winning.
Bankroll Management – What Is It?
Gambling bankroll management refers to setting aside an amount of money to spend on online betting and how you distribute those funds when placing your wagers.
While you can only increase your online gambling bankroll by depositing funds or winning your bets, it is essential that you limit your betting budget to an amount you can comfortably afford to lose.
Maintaining your bankroll and effectively managing it takes careful discipline. However, by wagering bets valued at a small percentage of your overall bankroll, you can absorb losses, accommodate variance, and play for longer.
How Does Bankroll Management Work?
There is no hard and fast strategy for bankroll management in sports betting, casino gambling, or poker betting. How you opt to manage your betting funds depends on how much you have to spend and whether you want to and can replenish your betting budget when it runs out.
Many bankroll management strategies that work well suggest establishing a percentage of your funds that you wager each time.
For example, if you’re playing poker, cash game bankroll management outlines that you should have a minimum of 50 buy-ins to ensure you can play the game without hassle. If you have a budget of £2,000, you need to find a game with a maximum buy-in of £40 to manage your bankroll correctly.
Why is Bankroll Management Necessary?
Online gambling sites, such as sportsbooks, poker rooms, and even the best online casinos in the UK, apply a house edge to the bets they accept. The house edge is the commission the gambling site takes for offering the bet, which means you will never earn back 100% in profits. Sometimes, online casinos apply a house edge of up to 20% on specific slots and table games, severely limiting your returns.
While you can implement online betting strategies and place careful wagers to help you make money, it is important to remember that losing bets and money is commonplace in online gambling due to the house edge.
Variance or the ups and downs of online casino gaming and sports betting also affect your bankroll, so you must make accommodations.
For example, if you have a bankroll of £2,000 and bet on black or red on a game of roulette, placing a bet of £200 each time, you only have 10 bets, all of which you could lose as sometimes happens.
But, if you employ roulette bankroll management strategies and lower your bet value to £20, you could wager 100 bets before you deplete your bankroll. This accommodates for variance as it is improbable that you will lose 100 bets in a row. As such, you can continue betting long term and potentially break even or profit.
Betting bankroll management allows you to play longer and accommodate variance without exhausting your playing funds. As such, it is a tool employed by top professional gamblers.
How to Manage Your Casino Bankroll
Casino bankroll management is essential. Unlike sports betting, casino games are based largely on chance, meaning you have very little control over the outcome of each bet. As such, losing money and quickly depleting your bankroll is much easier.
You can employ the best strategies for blackjack, roulette, or craps. But while this may allow you to work better with the house edge, it doesn’t eliminate it. As such, proper bankroll management is crucial when playing online casino games.
By managing your bankroll, your objective is to play for longer and increase your chances of winning. To do this when playing online casino games, we recommend placing bets that equal no more than 1% or 2% of your bankroll. This strategy is particularly handy at the best slot casinos, as slot games allow you to win large jackpots even if you have a low bet value.
Tips for Casino Bankroll Management
In addition to placing smaller bets that equal 1%-2% of your total bankroll, there are other tips that you can implement to boost your casino bankroll management further. These top tips include:
1. Avoid Progressive Betting Strategies
Utilising progressive betting strategies is a quick way to exhaust your bankroll. The idea behind these systems is that with each bet you lose, you increase (often double) your stake to ensure that when you do win, you cover all of your losses. However, variance and table limits make following these strategies almost impossible.
You will find that even the best new casinos apply minimum bet values to the games they offer. For instance, a roulette casino may impose a minimum bet of £100 on outside bets. If you apply this strategy to outside bets and you only have a bankroll of £1,000, you will quickly work through your betting funds:
2. Play Games with a High RTP
The casino games you choose to play can have a significant impact on your bankroll management. All online casino games have a return-to-player percentage that tells you how much you can expect to receive back on a bet of £100 when playing for an extended period.
Casino games often offer an RTP between 90% and 99%, depending on the game. So, if you wager a bet of £100 on a game with a 97% RTP, you can expect to make back £97. The remaining £3 is the house edge that the casino keeps.
For this reason, it is always best to choose casino games with a high RTP and a low house edge to maintain your bankroll for longer. Since blackjack has one of the highest RTP percentages, you may find bankroll management for blackjack players is much easier.
Some of the best casino games with a high RTP include:
| Online Casino Game | RTP Percentage |
| Single Deck Blackjack | 99.54% |
| Jacks or Better (Video Poker) | 99.54% |
| Baccarat (Banker Bet) | 98.94% |
| French Roulette | 98.65% |
| Craps (Pass/Don’t Pass Bet) | 98.59% |
3. Always Claim Your Bonus
Online casinos offer exciting promotional offers, including deposit match promos for new and existing players. These top casino bonuses offer to match your deposit in bonus funds, giving your bankroll a serious boost.
Claiming a casino bonus that increases your bankroll makes it easier to play more games for longer.
4. Use Bankroll Management Tools
If you’re not the greatest at math or you want to focus on the game without having to work out your bets or remaining betting funds continually, then there are several online tools that you can use.
For example, you can download a blackjack bankroll management app on your mobile device that will help you determine how much you should be betting if you want to play a specific number of rounds. You can find a bankroll management calculator that works for all casino games or specific ones.
How to Apply Poker Bankroll Management
Poker bankroll management differs substantially from sports or casino bankroll management as this game depends significantly on player skill. However, this also means you must be a successful poker player to win the game. Even if you have a top poker bankroll management strategy or a significant betting budget, you will find your playing funds depleted quickly if you’re a novice or don’t have strong poker skills.
Professional poker players tend to maintain strict limits on their bets and may use a poker bankroll management chart to keep them on track. Conversely, if you’re playing for fun, you can be more lenient and swap between levels with more fluidity.
Poker Bankroll Management Tips
If you’re an avid poker player, you’ll find that the best online poker sites offer extensive games you can play and enjoy. When visiting these sites, you can try these poker bankroll management tips to help you stay in the game for longer:
1. Select Your Limits
The limits you set when applying online poker bankroll management rest on three things: your level of skill, your budget, and the style of poker game you choose. Poker tournaments have a lot of variance that can affect your bankroll, so being more conservative in your approach is best when participating. Conversely, cash games offer more freedom.
- Tournaments – Poker tournaments offer more volatile variance, making winning consistently almost impossible for tournament players. You may enjoy significant wins off small bets, but similarly, you can experience extended losing streaks. For this reason, it is essential to have a more substantial bankroll that allows you to cope with the highs and lows of the game without stress, and as such, it is worth starting with a minimum of 100 buy-ins.
- Cash Games – Cash games are more forgiving and require fewer buy-ins than tournaments. However, the games still need a minimum of 50 buy-ins for proper cash game or Zoom bankroll management if you’re a novice player. Seasoned poker players and those who really know how to play poker can manage a bankroll of 30 buy-ins, whereas pro players usually have 100 buy-ins on these games.
2. Playing Live or Electronic Poker
Live dealer poker games are typically softer than regular online poker games. However, they take longer to play, which means balancing the variance will also take more time.
The best live casinos often offer around 25 hands of poker in an hour, whereas online games play much quicker and can offer up to 75 hands in the same timeframe.
For this reason, you can get away with 20 buy-ins when playing live dealer poker and enjoy less stringent bankroll management for poker played live and a higher win rate.
How to Implement Bankroll Management for Sports Betting
Sports wagering is highly unpredictable since the results are influenced by a human element. Unlike casino games that rely on software, sports events depend on the performance of individual athletes and teams as a whole. A sportsperson having a bad day could see the underdog winning the match, making outcomes highly volatile.
Bankroll management in sports betting requires several moving parts to navigate this volatility. The first is in-depth knowledge of the sports you’re betting on and the latest stats and standings, making it easier to spot trends and shifting markets.
Tips for Sports Betting Bankroll Management
The following tips will help you put a top sports betting bankroll management strategy in place and allow you to place more wagers on your favourite teams and sports events.
1. Choosing Your Wager Value
In sports betting, the bet value you apply should follow the same principles used when wagering on casino games, with a bet costing no more than 1%-2% of your bankroll total. While this may seem low, these micro stakes are an ideal starting point for new bettors learning the ropes, as they allow you to bet for longer and make room for winning bets.
However, the type of bets you wager also plays a role. While moneylines require a smaller bet of 1%-2%, over-under or point spreads are less tricky to nail, and as such, you can often increase your bet to around 5%.
2. Implementing Betting Units
Implementing betting units is a much simpler form of bankroll management if you are too focused on the money. This strategy involves converting your bankroll into units, which you use to bet with. Depending on how strong you think the bet is, you can bet more or fewer units.
Converting your bankroll to units is simple. For example, if you have a budget of £1,000, you could decide that one betting unit equals £10, which is 1% of your bankroll.
Strategies for Effective Bankroll Management
There are several bankroll management strategies that you can put in place to help you stay on the ball, counter variance, and make a profit. These include:
Percentage Betting
Percentage betting is a unique bankroll management strategy that allows you to take advantage of instances where the variance is in your favour, and you hit a hot streak and place more conservative bets when you experience a losing streak.
This strategy requires you to place a fixed percentage of your initial bankroll on each bet, irrespective of the type of bet or odds that apply. As such, as your bankroll shifts, so does your bet value.
For instance, if you have a bankroll of £600 and apply a fixed percentage of 1%, that means each bet you wager will be £6. However, if you lose a bet and your bankroll comes down to £594, your next bet will be £5.95. Conversely, if you win a bet and your bankroll goes up to £640, your following bet will be 1% of this, which is £6.40.
Flat Betting
An easy bankroll management strategy is flat betting. In this case, you wager a bet per betting unit, no matter the odds or bet you have chosen to wager. However, this gambling bankroll management strategy also takes a gambling site’s commission into account.
Flat betting has two approaches: a win or a risk. A win covers the commission, leaving you with a single bet unit as a payout. Conversely, a risk covers only the bet, where you lose the commission and receive a payout of one unit minus the vig or house edge.
Confidence Model
The confidence model is a bankroll management strategy that lives up to its name. This option relies on your confidence in a particular bet and requires you to place more significant wagers on bets you think have a greater chance of success. In other words, the more you think the bet will win, the higher your wager.
However, to stop this from getting away from you, it is best to implement a points system for your starting bankroll. You can use a system of one to three, with bets you’re less confident about ranking as a one and earning a £10 wager, while those you’re very confident about may receive a ranking of three and a £30 wager.
Bets to Avoid for Top Bankroll Management
Just as there are things you can do to improve bankroll management, there are also aspects to avoid to preserve your playing funds, such as the following bets:
Bets with a High House Edge
Avoiding bets (and games) with an extremely high house edge can make managing your casino bankroll much simpler. For example, blackjack typically has a high RTP of 99.54% and a low house edge. However, live blackjack games have bonus bets that often have a much lower RTP, making these bets ones to avoid.
Parlays and Same-Game Parlays
Parlays are a top choice for many sports bettors as they offer excessive payouts on a small bet. However, the odds are often poor, as is your probability of winning. Additionally, these wagers usually have excessive vig or juice of up to 6% as each bet you add to your parlay wager comes with its own vig.
Tips for Responsible Gambling
A significant part of bankroll management is practicing responsible gambling. By gambling responsibly, you pay greater attention to your betting funds and make more informed wagers, which makes building your bankroll easier. Some top tips for avoiding problem gambling and careless spending of your bankroll include:
Stick to Your Betting Budget
Before you begin betting, establish a budget and then stick to it. Ensure your bankroll is within your means and allows you to play comfortably without worrying about losses. Proper bankroll management will help you play with these funds for longer, so you don’t feel the need to deposit more money.
Never Chase Losses
The quickest way to exhaust your bankroll is by chasing losses. Chasing losses is when you experience a losing streak and continue to wager increasingly higher bets to try and recoup your losses. Be aware that from time to time, you will experience losses, and this is all part of betting variance.
Beware of Bad Lines
Don’t just bet on the odds offered by the first betting site you come across. Sign up with multiple sportsbooks and compare the odds offered on the same lines at each site. One sportsbook may offer better odds on Manchester United than another. In this case, it makes sense to take the better odds.
Bet When Sound of Mind
Lastly, betting should be a form of recreation and fun. If you place bets to escape daily life or while under the influence, you’re no longer wagering sensible bets and often make poor judgements based on emotion or impulsivity, leading you to deplete your bankroll quickly. Should you find yourself in this situation, it is always best to contact resources that can help, such as GamCare or GambleAware.
FAQs
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