Bankroll Management Strategies and When to Use Them

Managing your bankroll is the central problem professional bettors face. The goal is always the same: grow your bankroll. The strategies and tactics that are most effective for doing so differ depending on your resources:

• How much starting bankroll do you have?
• Which sportsbooks are available in your state?
• How have your sportsbook accounts been profiled?
• When, and for how long, are you available to bet?

Let's go through the best way to play your accounts throughout their lifetime.

Brand New Accounts

If you have never signed up for an online sportsbook before, I have wonderful news. The "true" value of a full set of new sportsbook accounts on the streets of Las Vegas is over $400,000. That means that someone who already knows what they're doing expects to conservatively win $400,000 using new accounts over their lifetime.

I'm not suggesting you go to Las Vegas and sell your accounts. I am suggesting that you learn what the people in Las Vegas already know, and earn $400,000 with your accounts using Ungambled.

For the purposes of this post, I'm going to make some necessary assumptions:

• You are in a legal online betting state
• You are available to place bets at the optimal times

Starting with $10,000 bankroll

Right now it's really not worth it to start with less than $10k. Maybe a future post will cover that. For now if you don't have $10k, show this post to someone who does and get them to loan it to you.

Phase #1, Big Bonuses

This phase is about strategically using bonuses to simultaneously grow your bankroll and get your accounts profiled as square, with high limits. The way to do this is to bet big on the most popular sports, at the most popular times, in the most popular markets, without triggering any flags from the sportsbooks.

What this looks like in practice is lots of high-limit moneylines and parlays. The sportsbooks see that you want to bet lots of money in a "dumb" way, and they happily raise your limits. If you aren't betting big, there's no reason for them to arbitrarily raise your limits.

Your bankroll isn't yet large enough to start grooming the accounts with churning, but after a month or so it will be.

Phase 2, Churning

If you are starting with a $20,000 or higher bankroll and have adequate time available, you can start this phase alongside Phase 1. This will get you the largest possible bonuses for as long as possible.

Using our affiliate GBank credit card, you can get 1% cash back on sportsbook deposits. This is huge. This means that you can move a lot of cash through sportsbooks at a profit while showing consistent losses at the sportsbooks.

One of the best overall financial portfolio management strategies is to have about 90% of your investments in maximally-conservative vehicles, and 10% in maximally-aggressive vehicles. In this case, that's 90% of your betting volume should be 0-1% hold hedges (because you get 1% back and want to max volume with minimal risk) and 10% in bonus-boosted +EV parlays.

If you want to reduce volatility, place more smaller parlays (40 $50 parlays) rather than fewer larger parlays (10 $200). Fewer, larger parlays is better long-term, and I'd recommend betting the limit on the parlay bonuses before filling out the rest.

This strategy is currently OP as fuck, and as long as it keeps working, don't even bother with moving into the next phase.

The Real Problem: Your bankroll is too big and limits are too small

Fast-forward a few years from the last section:

• You are up $300,000 from Gbank's 1% cash back, which means you have deposited and played through $30m of sportsbook handle.
• You bet so many +EV parlays that the volatility approached 0, and you averaged a 10% return on 10% of your bankroll 100 times over
• The gains from the parlays eventually outweighed the consistent losses from the hedging, and the sportsbooks have lowered your limits an order of magnitude

Now you have a new, very real problem: You have to bet 10x as much in order to keep growing your bankroll at the same pace. Eventually you just run out of time.

You have two good options:

• Keep doing the same thing. If it ain't broken, don't fix it. If this is your 3rd consecutive year of betting like this, you've got it down to a science in your daily routine. There's real-life value to not changing what doesn't need to change and just riding it out as long as it lasts.
• Switch to a pure +EV strategy

Phase 3, Burn it to the Ground!

Ok, the sportsbooks know you're a sharp. They've lowered your limits. Cat's out of the bag.

Now let's address the question you have lingering from the last section: if you know how to get a 10% ROI, why not do that for your whole bankroll right away?

When your bankroll grows 10% per day on average for a few weeks straight, the sportsbooks notice. That is very unusual for a square bettor and very normal for a sharp bettor. They decide to examine your account. They see that after a handful of square bets for the first few weeks, you switched to exclusively placing sharp bets and beat them for $20,000. Limited.

The problem with doing this too soon is it's easy to detect. If you want to maximize your profits, you must be more patient than the sportsbooks. Square bettors aren't patient.

If you execute this well enough, typically the next flag that will trigger a sportsbook review is when you hit a net profit threshold. At a certain point they have to admit you are beating them over a large sample size even if they don't know why. It would be negligent not to.

How to manage your bankroll in a pure +EV strategy

+EV bets don't look any different than your existing history to the sportsbooks, except they will have higher CLV (the metric they use to determine "sharpness"). This becomes a problem if they examine your account, so the game is to give yourself as much runway as possible before they do that.

The nature of +EV betting is very different from a hedging strategy, however. If your bankroll is big enough, this is literally the easiest strategy of all to actually do. You bet as much as possible on one thing at a time. No hedges. No extra parlays.

If your bankroll isn't big enough that the properly-calculated stakes for your wagers are over your betting limits, then you will have additional calculations to do for your +EV bets:

• Use Kelly Criterion to size individual bets based on your bankroll and the EV%
• Divide Kelly Criterion bet size by 3 or 4 depending on your risk tolerance. 3 is higher-risk. Do not use a number lower than 3 or you risk losing money long-term.
• Either avoid placing correlated bets (simpler) or adjust your calculations for overlapping risk between correlated bets

This is the home stretch. Burn it to the ground. Eventually your limits will drop to $1/bet. You might get banned. But you beat the sportsbooks.