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PATIENCE, DISCIPLINE & REALISTIC EXPECTATIONS
Patience and discipline are the two most important elements you need to understand in depth before you can succeed in sports betting professionally. We stress the importance of money management which is important but without patience and discipline there is no money to manage. In sports betting like the stock market having discipline is a special ability – if you cannot get a firm grasp on discipline and its importance in sports betting then you will never have an edge over the guy next to you. It seems easy but mastering patience and discipline is the most difficult challenge facing today’s sports bettors today with hundreds of betting websites and bookies just a click or phone call away. For 99% of bettors it’s virtually impossible to maintain patience and discipline over the long haul. The best way to overcome potential downfalls is to take it one day at time. Go off course for one day, win a game on your own, think you’ve got in under control then bam it snowballs and you begin chasing until the account is dry. By the time that pit in your stomach hits you it’s too late your bankroll is gone.
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Most bettors begin with a short bankroll, perhaps a few hundred dollars. Often bettors who load their sportsbook accounts with a small bankroll find it impossible to maintain patience and discipline. The reason is after a month their account is up a couple hundred dollars which can represent a nice % return but they want more. So they increase their wager size higher and higher without hesitation or thought. Soon the novice bettor ends up going to zero and reloading their account again for a few hundred dollars. A few hundred dollars a month ends up being thousands over the course of a year. Without patience, discipline and realistic expectations you’ll never achieve your dreams. We recommend a starting bankroll of at least $2,000, with the bonuses available online today this is an easy starting bankroll for anybody serious about winning long term.
RISKS VS REWARDS
Every time a bettor places a bet, he or she stakes a % of their bankroll, the size of which may or may not vary, according to their preferences and predetermined ideas. Using smaller fixed stakes involves less risk of losing the bankroll entirely. For a successful bettor the chances of ever losing it entirely are diminished. For a bettor without a unit size, the misfortune of losing will unfortunately be unavoidable, but it will not come around as quickly. In terms of growing the bankroll, smaller stakes will naturally contribute smaller profits, but more stable growth.
The larger the size of the betting stakes as a proportion of the bankroll, the greater the chance of "bankruptcy" if things go wrong. Five consecutive losing bets at $500 each, for example, would eradicate a bank of $2500 fairly quickly. If the stakes had instead been $50, the bettor could have afforded another 15 losses before bankruptcy. To most bettors, this will seem intuitively obvious, yet it is surprising how many still insist on using stake sizes that a proper risk assessment would consider to be entirely unacceptable.
Despite the greater Vigorish (vig or juice), many bettors like to increase the number of selections to a wager, attracted by the higher returns. The chances of winning a parlay, however, will always be less than for the individual selections which make them. It is not initially apparent, therefore, whether the longer-term return will be superior to flat wagers, and perhaps more importantly, how the longer-term risks will compare. Much will depend upon the edge that a bettor can on average achieve for his selections and the preferred size of his stakes.
Clearly, one way to limit risk exposure is to reduce the size of the stakes on multiple flat bets. Unfortunately, this also reduces the potential to gain at the same time. There always exists a trade-off between the impulse to achieve higher profits and the necessity to control risk. Herein lies the essence of gambling. Risk takers will win more in the short term, but must accept the greater prospect of severe misfortune. Risk avoiders must embrace a slower rate of return, but can potentially look forward to a longer betting "career". Whilst there is really no right or wrong way to bet, it may be argued that proactive risk management offers greater long-term security for a fixed odds sports bettor.
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