Baseball Betting Advice: Proper Money Management
By Loot, MLB Handicapper, Lootmeister.com
Money management is quite possibly the most important part of your betting profile. In Major League Baseball wagering, your success will inevitably come down to how well you manage your money. It is the one area of your makeup that you cannot afford to neglect. You might be the biggest whiz in picking winners and if you don’t have this area locked down--it won’t matter.
Money management in MLB betting is a little trickier than in the NBA or NFL. With the betting governed by the money line, you won’t be able to simply bet the same amount every time. That doesn’t mean you can’t maintain a solid base, where your bets are all in the same general ballpark. In other words, you don’t want to have some games where you bet a little, while betting a boatload on other games. There should be some general consistency to the amounts you wager. It makes it so one loss is never terribly devastating.
Sound money management also dictates that we do not over-extend ourselves. When we decide to begin betting on games, we allow for a certain amount of failure. One losing bet, or even a series of lost wagers, should not put you on the extinction list. Do not put yourself in a position where temporary failure leads to permanent failure. You should be betting only a fraction of your bankroll that allows you to absorb losses in a way that doesn’t spell doom. Most pros say that they never lay out more than 5% of their bankroll on any single bet. Many more say they never lay out more than 2% on any single wager.
FIND DISCOUNTED BASEBALL WAGERING ODDS AT 5DIMES
Betting more than a quarter of your bankroll a week is a sign that you may be over-extending yourself. And that’s assuming you are betting a handful of games per week. There should be variance. Some weeks will offer more betting opportunities, while other weeks are a bit more dried-up in terms of games you want to bet. In either case, we should only bet amounts we can withstand. If during the course of a week, we find our bankroll diminished by 25%, we either got really cold with our bets or we exercised poor money management. Being that it is rare to lose 12 straight bets, the latter probably applies more.
Part of money management is forming realistic expectations. Your expectations should not exceed the sentiment of wanting to bet on baseball, while picking up a little extra scratch. If you begin betting on baseball with the belief that you are going to become rich and one of the top baseball bettors in the world--you’re fooling yourself. Very few people even turn a profit betting baseball. Even fewer have managed to make a living off it. Not that you can’t, but it takes years to cultivate and then prove that you are in fact good at this.
How that affects your money management is that is puts your expectations in the right perspective. Winning at Major League Baseball wagering occurs as a steady and slow upward climb. You bet a bunch of games over the course of a season and try to emerge on the sunny side. Profits accumulate slowly. A popular quote associated with this is "It's a marathon, not a sprint."
Thinking otherwise can put you in the wrong mind-frame. You expect to hit the ground running and when faced with the inevitable setbacks--you begin to unravel mentally. A true test of a person’s money management skills is measured by how they act when they lose. In the midst of some unsettling losses, the tendency on the part of many is to scramble in an effort to recoup. Another old saying is "scared money never wins." And it's true!
When winning, it’s rather easy to adhere to a sound money management program. But just like anything in life, the true test occurs when things aren’t going very well. That’s how you test anything in life. For example, it’s easy to be a good friend when everything is going fine. You tend to see who your real friends are, however, in times of struggle. The same applies to your money management skills. If you can adhere to it in the face of a string of discouraging and painful losses, then you’re well on your way. If losses or bad weeks cause you to compromise the way you manage your money--that’s a surefire sign that you will become one of the 97% who end up failing at baseball betting on the long run.
