Bankroll Management
and disciplined punting.
Let’s have a look at some Bankroll Management. These days, when you all have one or more betting accounts and the use of cash is on its last legs, you should be able to manage your bankroll more easily than when we could only bet in cash. However that is easier said than done when it is so easy to just click a few more buttons.
For mine, the two biggest hurdles to maintaining our discipline and just having a punt on the judicious selections we have made is when,
a) We have hit a couple of winners
b) We have had a couple of bad beats
Let’s start with,
a) It is not very hard to convince yourself to have another bet when you are “on a roll”. Your two best of the day have just past the post in first place so why not have another bet? You are playing with their money (the bookmakers). Well, no you’re not. You are playing with your money, money that is too easy to give back, money that it is too easy to fritter away and money that you do not want to end saying farewell to forever.
Treat your bankroll like something that is precious to you. You should have your serious punting bankroll and it should be sacrosanct and not used for the extra quaddy, the day on the squirt punting with the boys or for that special trip to the track. If you want to play around with fun bets go ahead but leave your serious bankroll alone. Today, placing a bet takes a lot less time, a lot less travel and a lot less thought and there is the rub, if you want to win you have to think.
The first goal should be not to lose.
The betting providers are banking on mans innate greed to give back what they have won. Don’t! Don’t fall for the money back for second or third or the deposit bonus, set your rules and stick with them like glue.
Our very shrewd punter friend of mine went by the name of Jock. His name wasn’t Jock and he wasn’t Scottish, he just displayed one of the traits that the poor ol’ Scottish have been nailed with since forever. Jock owned the magic Ugg boot. Yes, he kept his bankroll in an Ugg boot and by his mid twenties could have probably purchased a merino farm and had a factory in Asia churning out Ugg boots by the container load. Jock was the original judicious punter and while he was also related to racing Royalty he never fell for the stable hype. You never saw him flashing his cash or even celebrating his numerous wins, the winnings went back into the Ugg boot. When he was making a withdrawal from the Ugg boot he only took what he needed to have for his preordained bets and not a skerrick more. On an unusual day when he didn’t back winners, he was never tempted to return to the woollen bank and make another withdrawal. There is a lesson there for all of us and it’s not too try and buy a magic Ugg boot. That was Jack, not Jock and it was beans not uggies.
We must prepare ourselves, regulate ourselves and show self restraint. Don’t have that extra bet and channel your energies into the next race that is a qualifier for you.
Now we turn out attention to,
b) Chasing winners and it never works in the long run, never. Okay, so you have run a few close seconds or landed three of the four quaddy legs so you are not far away so why not turn that luck around with one more bet. Why? Because to win in the long run you need to understand, and we all do, that there is never one last bet and we all know that they will be going around again tomorrow. Be Zen like in achieving the self-mastery of telling yourself NO! W Pike doesn’t always ride the last winner in Perth.
Save that footloose and fancy free punting attitude for that day out at the watering hole or the track with mates and especially with the non sacrosanct punting bankroll cash.
Use your punting bankroll for an aim, a financial aim or a set time frame to finish your “season” and start again or maybe now is the time to purhcase your own pair of Ugg boots but above all, set yourself a goal and work on making that goal achievable. Then Achieve it.
Most punters know as much as they need to know about punting so that they win often enough to believe that they are winning. Hmmm.
The best way to know if you are actually winning is to keep records of ALL your bets but before we get to that point, we have to know “what is VALUE”, how to use this mysterious value, and how to manage the bankroll that we have set aside for our serious punting.
Regardless of whether you are a casual punter just having a dabble on the weekend, or a professional making a living on the punt or one of the myriad positions in-between, you need to have a punting bankroll that is ONLY for the punt. This bankroll is separate from monies you need to pay for the rent, it is not for buying your partners Valentine gift and not even for your weekly slab for the man cave. Your PUNTING BANKROLL is for PUNTING. And need I say it, judicious punting.
I will help you enjoy your punting more because you will be constantly winning and not constantly depositing into your account.
Using Trigger’s Stable of stables will save you time and make you money if you follow the rules. Contact me on the email address at the bottom of the page for further details.
Your bankroll does not have to be huge. Follow the rules and show some discipline and your bankroll should be a one time outlay. The next few paragraphs will show you how to manage your bankroll and how to match your punting habits to your bankroll.
The starting point for conducting an analysis on the size of your bankroll is too accept the even the best of punters have losing streaks and that our bankroll must be sufficiently robust to combat these losing streaks.
The following table is based on a real formula and is borrowed from the punterspal.com. This table will help us discover what the length of our losing streaks will be and as a result, how large our starting bankroll needs to be.
Remember, we want to emulate Jock and the magic Ugg boot, not Jack and his not so magic beans.
Photo by Elle Hughes on Unsplash
If you are punting at a Strike Rate of 10% or less buy some wool and some knitting needles or get hold of Trigger’s tips by contacting at the email address at the bottom of the page.
First up, be honest with yourself, being so is the first step in becoming a successful punter. Don’t kid yourself that your punting success rate is something it is not. I would suggest that if you are telling yourself you have a winning strike rate of greater than 25%, I will buy your tips. I consider Trigger’s Stable(s) a constant source of winners and only 2 of the stables strike at 25%. However, all the Stables are in profit over the last 21 months. It is also true that one of the stables has only had a bet, on average, every 8 weeks over the same period. As you will see, it is about waiting for the right price. The VALUE bets. We are not talking OVERS just yet.
A Strike rate of 25% says to me that we only have a bet when the horse we invest on is $4 or greater in price.
But back to The Chart.
To discover what the starting balance of our bankroll should be, have a look at the column with the rather long title of “Max. Likely Losing Run Per 1000 bets”. At a Strike Rate of 25% our charts tells us that our max. losing run should be 24 races without a win. Of course we could have a winner with our 25th best and then the losing run could start again. Another reason we dont chase our losses.
For safety’s sake, I recommend that your starting bankroll be 4 times the charted losing streak.
Basing your starting bankroll on just the one losing streak is a recipe for disaster. Many people will recommend a starting balance of 5 times the predicted losing streak but a disciplined punter like yourself can get away with 4 times.
When we learn to make the most of VALUE we can start returning this initial starting balance to the financial institution we “borrowed” it from and then start the entire process again!
So, at a 25% Strike Rate our expected losing streak is 24 bets and this multiplied by 4 is equal to 96. Let’s round this to 100. We now calculate our bank roll. If we have decided that our Unit is equal to $10 our starting bankroll is $1000, 100 x $10.
So our starting bankroll is going to be $1000 (or whatever your calculation comes to). The same bankroll management theory that follows will apply regardless of the size of the starting balance of the bank roll.
There are many staking methods that can be applied but to start let’s start with a very simple method, a method that you can easily keep track of on an Excel spreadsheet (or a piece of paper and a pencil stub).
The staking method will be tied directly to our bankroll balance and it has 2 distinct advantages in both protecting our bankroll and building our bankroll.
We stated earlier that our $1000 bankroll balance is based on $10 bets, so we will use the $10 amount or 1% of the starting balance to commence.
As our balance goes up & down, depending upon our results, our investment on each race will stay at 1%.
Next there are two charts based on one of Trigger’s secret system selections from the 9th of February 2024 until the 28th of March 2024. The first chart shows the results when we back all qualifying selections and the second, as this method has a 25% strike rate, just those runners starting at $4.00 of more.
Chart 1
Here we see that over the recorded period of approximately seven weeks there were 84 qualifying bets. Some races had multiple selections.
The profit over this period was $165.74 or just over 16%. Close enough to a per annum profit of $1,160 more than doubling our bankroll. It would in fact be a greater amount as as our bankroll increases so would our 1% investment on each race.
I am happy with doubling my bankroll each year.
Chart 2
Once we eliminate the runners priced at $4.00 and under the number of bets decreases by about 25%. Our profit is also smaller but we still have profit with the total being $36.06. That is roughly $250 per annum.
For punters looking at making judicious selections and practising bankroll management for the first time, add in the amounts you would normally be depositing each day/week/month into you account and acknowledge they have gone and to be fair deduct your starting bankroll for this exercise.
The next step in your bank roll management journey is setting your own prices for all runners in a race. Known as tissue pricing, once you have a few guidelines, putting your tissues in a box is not as hard as it may seem.
Please keep your own records of your punting activities. If you have more than one type of punt such as win betting and then trifectas, keep the records separate so that you can analyse what is working and what is not. If you have read about Trigger’s stables you know there are a few. Trigger keeps the stable records separate and knows where the best bet to place on a race is. Record keeping, analysis and discipline, it’s the mantra you need to chant.