Bigger bets should follow stronger evidence, not stronger feelings. Learn when an edge justifies increasing your stake and how bankroll rules keep confidence from becoming risk.
Back to VideosSuppose I gave you and a friend both $10,000 and the same list of bets to make. Same games, same teams, same prices. What would you do to make more money than your buddy? Well, it turns out size really does matter. Bet size. Hi, I'm Jack from Unabated, where we provide software tools and education to help people find and place sharper bets. I've been a professional gambler for over 20 years. And one thing you learn fast when your livelihood depends on it is that it's not so much what you bet, but how you bet it. Bet sizing isn't always something inexperienced bettors think about.
They'll just bet big anytime they think they have some kind of angle, and that's why they're on a firstname basis with the deposit button. But with the right approach to bet sizing, you can maximize your profits while keeping your overall risk appropriate to your bankroll. There are mainly two ways most skilled sports bettors size their bets.
With your $10,000 bankroll, maybe you'd bet $100 a game. This is called flat staking, and it's basically exactly as it sounds. You bet a fixed percentage of your bankroll on every bet. Typically, that's about 1% to 2% of your bankroll for each play. Flat staking can be a great way to approach certain kinds of bets, and we'll get into that later. But the important part is that you're risking a small enough part of your bankroll that a run of bad luck won't wipe you out.
But there's another way to do it, and it might mean that you're betting $400 from your $10,000 bankroll on one bet and $50 on another. It's called the Kelly criterion, and it's a go-to formula that many sharp bettors use to maximize their bankroll growth. It's commonly used in financial markets, but it also works for sports betting. It uses a formula to figure out the best bet size for optimal bankroll growth. Now, don't get too scared by needing an algorithm to figure out your bet size. It's actually pretty straightforward. You bet your edge divided by the odds. So, if your edge is 4% and the odds are even money, you'd bet 4% of your bankroll according to the Kelly criterion.
If any of the variables change, your bet size does too. I'll drop that formula below with instructions on how you can set it up in Excel or Google Sheets. I'll also give you a link to our free bet tracker that you can download, which has a built-in Kelly calculator. Now, neither of those flat staking or kelly staking are how people get themselves into trouble, though. I see newer bettors fall into this trap all the time. They think, "Oh, my bankroll is only $500. I have an edge. I need to bet bigger to grow it faster. Let's fire $100 bets."
At that size, it only takes a couple of bad bounces in the fourth quarter to turn that $500 into a fresh debit in your checking account. Even if you have an edge, making huge bets relative to your bankroll is just too risky. You're leaving your bankroll at the mercy of blown saves, backbreaking penalties, and Carlos Alcarz going full-on final boss. Let's get back to our $10,000 bankroll challenge. Your first thought might be that if you bet big and hit on a few in a row, you could build an insurmountable lead. And if that bet big early strategy doesn't work for you, you could just bet bigger to get back into it. It's pretty faulty.
Even if you started hot, winning three of your first four bets and patting your roll, any three-game losing streak can wipe you out almost immediately. Especially if you start chasing your losses to try to get back to profitability. If you find yourself in a bankroll challenge, hope your opponent bets exactly like this because there's a great chance he beats himself. Now that you know you're not going to overb, your plan is to use 1% of your bankroll as your unit size, which means betting $110 to win a h 100red on minus110 bets.
Here's how those bets would go when you're flat staking. After going six and four, you're up $160. Now, that might not pay for your new convertible, but you've risked $1,100 to win 160. That's almost a 15% return on investment. It sounds a whole lot better than getting 10 grand in the hole. Flat staking is easy to do. It's basic math and you don't need to break out a calculator when you want to get more money down. You can recalculate your flat stake every time your bankroll increases or decreases by a certain percentage and still manage your risk responsibly. Plus, it's a great approach for betting props.
I'll explain why in a second, but first, let's see if there's a better way to make even more with the same $10,000. If you were to use Kelly staking, you can take advantage of betting more in higher edges, but first you need to have a very good estimate of your edge. If you overestimate your edge, you will end up overbedding with Kelly staking, which is very bad.
The other complication is that sports aren't dealt from a finite deck of cards. There's a lot of randomness and variance that happens in any sporting event, so being certain of your edge can be much harder. A way that sharps get around this is to bet what's called fractional Kelly. This is achieved by taking the Kelly stake size and dividing it further. Half Kelly would be dividing it by two. Quarter Kelly would be dividing it by four. If you think the fair price on our 10 bets is -25. The Kelly criterion says we should bet about 6.7% of our bankroll on each minus 110 play. We'll call that 6% just to make the math clean.
It's $600 for the full Kelly stake or $150 if we're betting quarter Kelly. Now you can see how that plays out over 10 bets. We start by betting $150 and increase our stake each time we win. And when we lose, our stake decreases in proportion to our bankroll. When all 10 bets are done, you've increased your bankroll to $10,29, almost 60 bucks more than you would have made flat betting. Different sports betting markets have different levels of efficiency. And that's why flatstaking is better for prop betting than using the top down method. You're never as sure of your edge in efficient prop markets as you are in big markets like an NBA total or an NFL side.
You can play around with the different edges and starting bankrolls to see how Kelly would do in the same sequence of bets. And if flat staking is a little too conservative, but Kelly is a little too complicated, there's a third method some bettors use.
You can start with a baseline stake like 1%. But adjust it up as your edge hits certain thresholds. If your edge was 5%, for example, you might increase your bet to 1.5% of your bankroll or to 2% of your bankroll at 10% of an edge or more. Just be careful you don't go overboard when you scale up. Remember that the point of proper bet sizing is to protect your bankroll from the natural swings that come in betting while also growing it further. And when you overb your bankroll, you increase your risk of ruin. There's a much higher chance you go broke even if you're betting with an edge.
The only downside to underbetting your bankroll is slower growth when you have an edge. For beginning bettors, you may want to be conservative and use flat staking of 1% in your plays, whether they're sides, totals, or props. As you get more confident in your edges, you can work in a hybrid approach and increase your stake a little bit as your edge increases. Once you trust that your edges are accurate, you can start to implement Kelly betting. Just keep in mind that in prop markets, it's harder to be certain about your edges, which makes flat or hybrid staking a more attractive option to protect yourself from that uncertainty. Any of those three approaches are perfectly acceptable ways to size your bets.
