What is a Betting Bank and why do I need one!
A Betting Bank is a pool of money that you set aside separately from your everyday living money and the purpose is to use it to bet and at iTipsports we believe the Betting Bank is crucial.
It doesn’t matter whether your betting is for entertainment purposes, if your semi professional or a pro and do it for a living. If you are not allocating money for a betting bank and you are gambling you are doomed to fail from the start.
The scary thing is that most people who are investing in horses and sports betting do not take the time nor have the discipline to start with this most basic step. You can be sure that bookmakers win principally because of the losses from not having both of these things:
1. Did not have a Betting Bank
2. Did have a Betting Bank but kept betting after losing it.
Chasing losses lacks discipline of the punter!
Chasing losses is one of the, if not the greatest sin of investing in racing and sports betting. The inability to just walk away and say “today was not my day” but I will “live to fight another day”. It takes discipline but it is achievable.
If you want to have any success investing in sports and horse racing betting at a level that does not impact your life negatively (ie: problem gambling) you must have an allocated Betting Bank and only use that amount for your betting!
How much money do I need?
This is a very personal question and it all depends on how much money you are willing to allocate to investing in racing and sports betting. Also think about it in terms of 6 month blocks (ie: I’m comfortable to commit $ amount to my betting bank and I will not deposit or withdraw for 6 months). This really allows you to detach from emotion which we will get into shortly.
It is very important to outline the obvious….
The amount of money you allocate to a Betting Bank is an amount of money you are comfortable should you lose and if you lost that money it would not be harmful in any way to you or to those you are financially responsible for.
The above is a very important point, for many punters begin as some fun entertainment, but without the correct awareness and safeguards thought out in advance it can very quickly deteriorate to be anything but entertaining.
And remember you can lose so it is important to take all precautionary actions to understand
Emotion is an enemy!
Emotion is by far the biggest enemy of any punter, its not a bad ride on a horse, its not an unlucky sports play, its not a bookie who offered under the odds, the biggest enemy of the gambler is the punter themselves.
This gets back to the chasing losses issue which is full of emotion, with the outcome from this the lack of discipline.
You see investing in racing and sports betting is filled with emotion, a high when you win and a low when you lose. What tends to happen though is both of these emotions tend to attract the punter to more gambling. The winning punter wants to win more and the losing punter wants to win their money back. The only reason these two things occur is because the punter sees the wins/loses as part of their “everyday” money.
The punter does not have an allocated starting Betting Bank. The winning punter is fantasising about all of the things they can now buy with their winnings and the losing punter is in despair about what they now can’t buy as they have lost their money.
If these punters had allocated a set Betting Bank they would neither crave to buy things with winnings or chase the loses as they are investing with a pre committed amount of money that is for betting purposes only. And is not added to or withdrawn from for 6 months. This really detaches the emotional energy from wins/loses and hopefully prevents you from chasing your money should this occur.
How much of my Betting Bank do I use per bet?
In general use 1-2% of the opening balance per bet and anymore than this is detrimental to the very reason you have a bank in the first place.
What this means though is you have to check the ego at the door, your bets will be smaller than you are used to as you adjust to this new smarter way of betting, so a bet of $10-20 would require a betting bank of between $1,000 or 2,000 dollars.
For example a couple of scenarios may be as follows:
A $1,000 bank would be say 1% of bank per bet ie $10 per bet
A $2,000 bank would be say 2% of bank per per bet ie $40 per bet
So at iTipsports we would like you to think about an amount of money you are comfortable to commit to a Betting Bank and get the most basic step in place before you place your next bet.