Key Points
- Have a dedicated bankroll to maintain financial and personal balance
- Define your per point bet amount and be consistent
- Keep detailed records of your bets and always be willing to adapt
As a punter, you may think that all you need to do is to pick winners to be successful. However, that is only half of the battle. To succeed long term, you must be disciplined, and you need to get the basics right. Today’s guide breaks down some of the fundamentals for you.
Incidentally, if you’re new to my content, I’m RacingGav and I’m the resident horse racing expert here at Betting.co.uk. Whilst I predominantly post daily betting tips, antepost picks, and big race trends, I also produce guides covering other aspects of racing, the
UK handicap system, for example. Guides like this one are designed to help you gain a better understanding of how things work, and make informed decisions when you bet.
Before I move on to the nitty gritty, let me just say that sometimes you just need to take the easy wins. One of those comes in the form of the free bet deals most bookmakers offer to secure your business. One such example is Betano, an excellent brand that I’m keen to highlight today. If you deposit and bet £10, you’ll get £30 in free bets. That’s well worth taking up, especially if you’re currently in the process of spreading your betting wings.
Betting is not a get quick rich scheme
Many people fail at betting because they want quick wins. They often have little to no discipline, and may even bet more than they should. If you want to succeed at betting in the long term, there are some basics you need to get nailed down right at the start. In this article, I’ll explain exactly what I mean by that.
Have a dedicated betting bankroll to maintain financial and personal balance
Before you even consider placing a bet, you need to work out how much you can afford to lose. That might sound a little negative, but trust me, it’s the right way to go about things, and you must be honest with yourself. So start with a realistic amount, one that you can comfortably afford to lose without it impacting on your everyday life.
Once you have crunched the numbers and come up with a figure, I recommend setting this money aside. You need to keep your betting bankroll and your other finances completely separate as intertwining the two can get very messy and make it much harder to keep track. It’s up to you how you do this, you could distribute it across your betting accounts, open a separate bank account just for the purpose, or open an ewallet account with a reputable provider like PayPal.
With that done, you must now view that money as gone from your life. If you start out by thinking
“I can take it back out if I need it”, you’re likely to be betting beyond your means. Conversely, it’s just as wrong to have a mindset of
“I can just add more to it if I need to”. Of course, all of this comes down to personal choice, but let me just say one thing. You won’t get a gold sticker for being the biggest punter out there, so park your ego at the door, and be honest with yourself about how much you gamble, always.
Define your per point bet amount and be consistent
With a bankroll figure in place, you now must decide how you want to use it. Everybody has their own opinion on the best way to do this, but for the purposes of this guide, I will explain my own way of operating. The first thing to do is to divide your bankroll by 100, and this becomes your standard bet amount. So, if you have a ÂŁ1,000 bankroll, your standard bet amount would be ÂŁ10. Likewise, if it was ÂŁ100 it would be ÂŁ1, and for ÂŁ500 it would be ÂŁ5.
In addition I use a point structure, where my standard bet amount equates to one point, or as it’s more commonly written “1pt”. What this means is that you can afford to bet and lose 100pts before you exhaust your bankroll. This may sound excessively cautious, but inexperienced punters may be surprised by just how tough the game can be at times. As a general rule, even the most experienced and successful punters will lose more bets than they win, it’s just about making the winning bets pay.
It’s a fact of life that everybody has losing runs. I could do a whole article on losing runs, and they can come as a real shock for those with less experience. If you are backing horses at 10/1 with a 10% strike rate, you would be a profitable punter. However, it’s never as simple as one win, nine losses, one win, nine losses and so on. You’re more likely to see flurries of winners, commonly described as “purple patches”, followed by losing runs.
I ran some simulations based on the aforementioned data. If our fictitious punter placed 1,000 bets on horses with odds of 10/1, and achieved a 10% strike rate, they could expect to have losing runs of around 50 bets, but that could extend to 70 or more occasionally. This is where the 100pt bankroll comes into play, and having it in place means you won’t need to top it up during the tough spells.
Keep detailed records of your bets and always be willing to adapt
The final fundamental is keeping track of all your bets. Thanks to modern technology, this is made very simple by using a spreadsheet, Microsoft Excel, or Google Sheets, for example. Ultimately the more effort you put into this part, the better the data will be for you. At the very least, always track the financial side to see how you’re getting on. But speaking from experience, if you take the time to add more information about each race you bet on, you can build a really valuable database over time.
From a financial point of view, you can see whether you’re in profit or not, and to what degree. If you’re in profit, you can look more closely at what is working and do more of the same. Conversely, if you’re making a loss, you can look to change your tactics, or avoid certain scenarios altogether. If you’re adding in extra details, you can use the data you’ve collated to pinpoint certain trends. For example, you may find that you’re particularly strong at finding winners at specific tracks, or in races run over a certain distance.
Plan ahead
I would also recommend that you have a plan in place for what to do in various circumstances, whether they are positive or negative. For example, you currently have a £500 betting bankroll and you are betting £5 per point. You find you are in profit and your bankroll stands at £1,000. You now have two options. You may decide at that point you want to withdraw £500, and continue as usual with the remaining £500. Alternatively, you may decide to increase your per point bet amount to £10. On the other hand, if you find you’ve made a loss, and have only £200 of your bankroll left, you could either carry on regardless at £5 per point, or reduce your bet amount to £2. Either way, it’s better to have a predetermined plan rather than bringing emotion into it when the time comes.
Avoid scenarios like this…
It’s the type of punter that chucks £20 into their betting account with no real plan that can cause themselves issues. They’ll likely bet the whole £20 on a single outcome, or at best, spread the amount across two to four bets. If they lose, they’ll deposit another £20, and it can then become a vicious cycle. Chasing the lost £20 can become £40, and quickly it becomes £60, £80, £100 and so on. It’s all too easy to completely lose track when you operate like this, as you never see the cumulative result. With a set bankroll, you always know exactly where you are. If you have a £500 bankroll and you’re on £450 or £550, you know at a glance that you’re £50 down, or £50 up, respectively.
Implement these fundamentals and take your betting to the next level
As I see it, the factors I’ve highlighted in this guide are all essential parts of successful long term betting. Not everyone will agree with me, and what they do with their own hard-earned money is up to them. For many, betting on sports is simply a fun activity. It might just add a bit more excitement to a particular horse race, or a football game that’s on the TV. In which case, winning a bet would be a nice bonus, but they’re effectively spending their money on the enjoyment factor, the adrenaline rush from having some skin in the game.
This article is aimed more at those who are looking to take things a little more seriously. If that’s you, then hopefully these fundamentals can help you build a foundation to work from, and allow you to take emotion out of the equation. Ultimately, successful long term betting is all about discipline. You need to be able to know when to bet, and when not to. Most importantly, you need to know how much to bet, which is where a fixed bankroll and the points system come into their own.
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