Friday 7 September 2012

Keeping your bankroll full, using the Kelly Criterion

By Jack Hobson


Betting on sports is now a fascination for many, with more and more people indulging in this type of online gambling than in other traditional gambling games. Gambling is now a worldwide phenomenon with most countries establishing laws to legalize and regulate it. Concise laws have been established to regulate betting it has developed into an industry with many web gambling companies competing for members on a global scale. However, in reality, managing your cash is not just important, it's absolutely critical if you want to show a profit in the long term. Failure to exercise proper cash management more than often results in excessive bankroll swings, or even the instant loss of your entire betting bankroll.

The first key to bankroll management is to bet cash that's specifically meant for sports gambling. If you are not interested in showing a long term profit or being a serious sports gambler, that's fine; in that case, you can always just spend a few dollars into an web based sportsbook account and start betting until you lose it. But for serious bettors, having a dedicated bankroll is a must.

Having that bankroll is important for many reasons. First of all, you do not want to end up getting from money that is needed for bills or other expenses just to make a bet. As a matter of fact, you must absolutely make sure that you're not betting with money you need to cover expenses or that is being saved for any other purpose. But the up side of having a dedicated bankroll go beyond your own protection. It also gives you a base from which to gauge how big your bets should be on average, and makes sure you always know how much cash you have to work with.

The most common way to manage a bankroll is to choose a percentage of your bankroll you'd like to wager on each bet. The optimal way of doing this is named the Kelly Criterion. The idea behind the Kelly Criterion is to maximize the speed at which your bankroll will increase while maintaining your risk of ruin as low as possible. Computing your Kelly Criterion is relatively easy. In the first place, when making a bet, take your chance of winning that bet and multiply it by the odds you are receiving. Then, take that number and subtract your chance of losing the bet.

However, it's probably best to bet less than what the Kelly Criterion says you should bet. This is mainly because we tend to overestimate our chances of winning any given bet. For example, while you might think that you have a fifty percent odds of winning the bet in the above example, the odds are that your actual edge isn't nearly that big. Is it a common thing for you to empty your sportsbook bankroll again and again, even if the percentage of bets you win is high? If so, chances are that your most important problem isn't with the bets your making, but mostly with cash management. However, many sports bettors fail to realize this, and neglect money management. Then, it's best to gamble safe and bet less than what the Kelly Criterion suggests




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