MLB Betting: Sticking To a Plan
By Loot, Major League Baseball Handicapper, Lootmeister.com
Anyone can come up with a plan. Sticking with it is the key. When betting on Major League Baseball, there will be many things that come up that will challenge your ability to stick to a plan. Some are good things and some are not, but the result is almost always bad. We need to stay on course at all times. In baseball wagering, deviating even a little bit can be the beginning of the end.
We start with a bankroll. It doesn’t matter what it is, but let’s call it $500. A reasonable framework is to bet 2% on each game, while never exceeding 25% of our total bankroll in the course of a week. Well, 2% of $500 is $10, so maybe we allow ourselves to bet enough to win $10. So that might mean betting $18 on a favorite, depending on the line. Exercising proper money management is imperative in order to sustain the highs and lows. And you will have them!
Our bankroll either grows or shrinks slowly. Sure, we’d like to bet more on games. We are willing, however, to pay our dues. That means proving ourselves at the lower levels, just like a big leaguer first has to play in a tank town. 2% a game seems like tiddlywinks. But the number can start to the grow. A $10 bet is soon a $20 bet. Next season, you’re betting $100, then $200.
Over the course of years, the numbers can actually start to become pretty major. But how many of us are truly patient enough to commit to this course? The normal betting man is not trying to take years to get to the “show.” He wants to slug it out and see if he can’t fight his way to the top quickly. That almost never works though. Take it from me. I lost my tail for many years before I even got a sniff of winning. And that didn't happen until I decided to give up my haphazard ways and do things and take the proper approach.
The most common downfall is when people start losing or, believe it or not, winning. They start changing their bet amounts. A guy losing will chase, while the guy on a hot streak starts thinking “why not win more?” We’ve seen it before. We’ve done it before. We start off with the $500. After a week of sticking to our plan, we’re down to $436. The next week, it’s down to $398. We see an ace is a -260 favorite. We figure we’ll get back to even on this one game. We lose. Now we’re down to $170. We make a parlay with two favorites and lose that and now we’re finished and hitting up the Visa card to reload.
The winner who starts raising the 2% mark for individual bets is doing so on shaky grounds. He’s jumping the gun, thinking he’s a proven winner before it’s been established. The proof is in the pudding. Let the bankroll do the talking. Prove you can pick winners betting 2% on each game at $500, then $1000, then $2000, and so on. Taking $500 and turning it into $750 is good, but hardly qualifies as just cause for you to start acting out-of-school.
The casino business is built on the fact that people can’t keep a plan. There is something about gambling and betting that just taps into a human’s psychology on a deep level. Otherwise sound and well-reasoned individuals have been rendered into madmen by the act of wagering. We’ve all known people we respected going off the deep end. We might not fall into that category exactly, but even a minimized form of that can be deadly.
It’s important to not underestimate our adversary. We are not only matching wits with the book, but we have the whole institution of gambling going against us. We must steel ourselves for the battles which we will face. For many of us, the toughest opponent isn’t the bookie--it’s ourselves. It’s how we react to gambling, whether winning or losing. If our emotions fluctuate along the lines of our profit margins, we are far less likely to be able to stick to any kind of reasonable plan.
It takes years to certify either a winner or loser as it strictly applies to picking baseball games. Most never get far enough to even make a judgment renderable. Because their failure was based on not sticking to a plan. They started betting more, limiting their chance at success to a small handful of games. Developing a solid plan and sticking to it guarantees that whether you win or lose, you will at least be decided by your ability to pick winners. In other words, sticking to a plan will at least offer you a fighting chance.
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