The buzzwords “money management” is thrown around left and right in the gambling world. Look around for advice on money management and you will find everything from grossly incomplete articles to full blown strategies for brilliant mathematicians. Today, I will share a quick and easy money management strategy that you can use each time you gamble. It’s effective and takes just a minute to learn.
I will give you an easy way to manage your gambling sessions. Sure, you could dive deeper into money management and run it like a business, but this isn’t practical for most people. Gambling with no money management is foolish though. By simply managing your sessions, you will give yourself a better opportunity to win and withstand losing streaks.
This session management strategy will work for games like Craps, Roulette, Baccarat, Blackjack and so forth. Sports betting and poker would require a little tweaking. Here’s the basic content. Gambling is full of streaks. The worst thing I can think of is encountering a long losing streak when you first start playing. Talk about a bad experience. The goal of this strategy is to give you a fighting chance to withstand those losing streaks and to allow you to capitalize on the winning ones.
Step One: Bankroll
The first step is to come up with an amount of money you wouldn’t mind losing. This is called your bankroll. For our example, I will use $200 as my bankroll and I will be playing Blackjack.
Step Two: Betting Units
A betting unit is simply the amount of money you will bet per opportunity–per hand in Blackjack. Since streaks can last a little while, we want to divide our bankroll by 25. It’s ok to divide by more, but doing less is really not helping much. Dividing my bankroll by 25 gives me $8 betting units. I can now bet up to $8 per hand.
Step Three: Action
Let’s assume there’s an $8 table somewhere–yes, I know there isn’t, but this is just hypothetical. It would be foolish to play there, even though my betting unit is $8. You want to give yourself the opportunity to bet up and down. In this case, going to a $5 or less table is optimal. Occasionally, you need to reevaluate your bankroll and adjust your betting unit up or down. For example, if I were to raise my bankroll to $300, my betting unit is now $12. I will want to increase my wagers.
As you can see, this simple strategy of managing your money will allow you to increase profits, withstand many losing streaks, and have more fun.
By Jason A. Martin
Jason A. Martin is a copywriter and journalist. If you would like original gambling content, visit GamblerContent.com. He also runs a gambling website marketing service at GamblerMarketing.com.
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