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Steve Larson - 18/06/08Being a successful sports bettor comes down to two basic concepts you need to understand and tackle correctly. The first one concerns the bet itself. Just going with the flow and siding with the squares is not going to cut it for you. Such bets are negative expected value ones due to the vig (which is around 10%). Why is it a negative EV undertaking? Because a well balanced match-up is like a coin-flip, and in case of a 10% juice, you'll bet $110 to win $100, which is very the definition of the negative EV.
You need to be able to seek out edges that disrupt the balanced nature of the match-up making it a 60-40 affair instead of a 50-50 one or something of the sort. This is the only way to generate value on your bets, and there are a few techniques you can take advantage of to achieve this, but more on that in a different article.
The fact alone that you get your EV right though, doesn't mean that you'll turn a consistent buck on your wagers. While the percentage of winning bets needed to beat the vig is around 52%, and good bettors can achieve 56-58% there's one more ingredient needed to make your investment a lucrative one: bankroll management.
Bankroll management is the Achilles' heel for most good handicappers, because it requires discipline, something that gamblers generally find extremely difficult to garner. Why do you need proper bankroll management? Because the EV+ that you painstakingly eek out of your bets needs time to make its effects felt. Sports betting is extremely streaky, and therefore, without bankroll management you risk busting out, without ever letting your hard-earned EV+ work for you. The bottom line is, EV+, much like a casino's house edge is a long-term edge. If you're not around long enough for it to kick in, you will not enjoy the benefits.
There are two basic bankroll management methods, and knowing them both with their plusses and minuses will help you decide what's best for your roll. All bankroll management should begin with the setting aside of a certain amount of money, destined exclusively for sports betting. Playing on scared money like the rent, or any other essential part of your monthly budget should be avoided at all cost for obvious reasons.
The first bankroll management method is the flat betting method. As its name suggests, flat betting is about placing the same amount of money (always 2% of your entire bankroll) on any one game you wager on, regardless of whether or not you reckon it's a lock one way or the other. This is a mathematically proven method, one that guarantees you'll be generating a steady trickle of cash provided you've managed to secure EV+ on the bet itself. The 2% is a small enough one-time investment to guarantee that not even prolonged losing streaks will bust you out of the game. On one hand, this means you'll be winning smaller, but in a mathematically secure way, on the other hand, it tells us that if you want to win big and stay on the safe-side, you need to make your starting bankroll as big as possible. That way, those small wins will not be as small as they add up. As your bankroll increases, after you've achieved a 25% growth, you may adjust your flat bet amount accordingly. Let's say you're playing on a $100 bankroll. You bet $2 on each of your match-ups, until your bankroll grows to $125. From there on, you can bet $2.5 thus increasing your potential revenue and staying within the limits set by the method.
The scaled betting method is for the risk takers. Before I go into details on it, please note that the flat betting method is the one I recommend as the mathematically more feasible way.
Many people do not view their wagers as some sort of investment though, but rather as a way to have fun, and they are willing to pay for it. For these guys as well as for the more aggressive ones who cannot stick to the rules set by flat betting, scaled betting is a good solution. Set yourself a scale based on the 'feel' you get on match-ups. Based on various sources of feedback (handicapping, weak lines, suspected advantages, statistical trends etc) you may feel strongly about one game, and a much less so about another. Bet up to 5% of your bankroll on games you feel good about, and as little as 1% on the ones you don't. This way, - in theory at least - you'll be able to bet more on winning games, and less on losing ones.
Again, be aware that the flat betting method is the mathematically more efficient approach.
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