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Chris Meaney
I wanted to write something to explain expectations of following along with golf wagering, and this could be helpful for your wagering in other sports as well.
You could be great at picking winners in any sport, but if you’re terrible at managing your money, you will end up losing. Downturns are an inevitable part of wagering, and that’s where bankroll management comes in. Even if you do not have a long-term edge, manage how you stake your wagers will stretch out your bankroll. This process is what people fail the most with when it comes to wagering.
Recreational bettors don’t often have a “bankroll” to begin with or don’t have the willpower to shift their wagering during the losing streaks. For many the system is “one unit, one unit…” until they need to deposit again. If that works for you, enjoy your entertainment, but the point of this article is to hopefully reshape your thinking if you’re truly trying to be profitable over time even as a recreational bettor. Recreational bettors have many opportunities to make money wagering where professionals do not. Whether that’s betting openers, not being limited, access to prop markets, etc. If you work hard to find an edge, don’t blow it with poor staking.
Realistically, a proportional wagering system will allow your bankroll to always be stretched and you theoretically would not hit $0. By proportional wagering I mean that the size of your wager is a percentage of your bankroll. It is much preferred to use a proportional system, but I know not everybody wants to track their bankroll size, learn Kelly calculations, and everything else that goes into properly designating a bet size.
I would suggest that if this isn’t something you’re interested in; you can still manage your money by simply using a fixed wager for every bet. That is find an amount of money that suits you and simply wager that amount. This isn’t the best idea, but it is however much better than trying to use your “gut” to determine how much to wager.
I personally use a fractional Kelly calculation to determine my bet size based on my bankroll and edge. For FTN subscribers, I then post these wagers in approximate units. This is a bit of a combination of both methods. I attempt my best with this conversion to scale the units to allow my larger edges to have slightly larger unit wagers. It’s not perfect but I understand subscriber unit sizes vary greatly.
I wrote an earlier article on Expected Value and Staking as well where I get more into using Kelly Calculations to determine wager sizing, if that is something you’re interested in.
On any given week wagering on golf, I could have anywhere from 0 to 25 bets. It depends on what tours are playing, what markets are available, and the odds. You should be aware going into any given week the demands of your bankroll to tail every bet. Perhaps you only want to follow PGA bets, so you wager more than what I suggest since my bankroll is spread across multiple tours. That will be up to you to decide. I just think it’s fair that you should expect to potentially lower your unit size from what you use in football to what you use for golf. If you find yourself wagering 20 units per week, I suggest you have a bankroll of at least 2,000 units available if you indeed have a separate gambling fund from your regular money. 1% exposure of your bankroll may seem conservative but again, these are suggestions I’m making; you ultimately choose your own adventure.
