Money management is an important part of a professional NBA punters’ business. It’s not just deciding on whom should you invest your money on, when to place the wager, it’s also – how much. This obviously depends on how much money do you have, but it can be useful to go through some general guidelines.
Whether you are an experienced punter or one still taking strokes to stay on the surface, these guidelines can give you a good base to build your investment plan. Even if you don’t bet on the sports market for life or do it just for the fun of it, you can find some useful advice in the following paragraphs.
Establishing an NBA betting fond
This is like a step one for anyone serious about their finances. Professional sports betting and gambling are not the same, and establishing a betting fond is what separates the two instantly. Gamblers will bet their rent money, bank loan and can end up on the street if not careful. This is not the way you do this business, even if based in Vegas.
You need to sit down and make a distinct betting fond that would be completely separate from your family finances. You can think of it like a startup investment. Decide on the size of it by your own rules, but make sure that you are fairly comfortable with losing it all. Nobody wants to do that, but it shouldn’t affect your life money.
If your savings are $10,000 and you want to invest $5,000 or $2,000 in your betting on the NBA, it’s fine with me. Just make sure that you are not required to touch into the fond after a couple months because you need a new set of golf clubs. Once dedicated, the betting fond should not be tinkered with (added to or withdrawn from) for at least a year.
Keep in mind that the decision on the amount of money you are going to work with will directly impact the amount of money you are going to bet on the NBA games, also the amount of money you could earn, or lose. The higher the stakes are, the quicker the turnover is, but what’s someone’s million, the other’s is dollar. Make sure that the size of the fond fits your social status.
You are not going to impress anyone with the size of it, but don’t be too shy either, unless you are just playing with the betting. NBA games spread limits go from $10 to $40,000 through the regular channels, so it’s for almost everybody.
Uniform staking
You must have already seen that some of the betting advisors recommend staking a certain bet 7/10 or 5/10. While some do make it clear, I figured I’d take a moment to explain that such denotation does not represent the actual stake, but only the punter’s confidence in the suggested wager. Which, in turn, means pretty much nothing.
Confidence in an outcome is a punter’s enemy if anything, so you should never decide on the amount of the money you are to invest on one outcome by it. It’s a bias, and you should try to avoid all kinds of subjective decisions.
Now that we got that clear, there’s no need to stake all of your bets equally. If an opportunity arises and the value on taking a bet is larger than usual, then, by all mean, you can be more aggressive. The same applies if the value is not high enough and you want to go with a lower stake. These deviations shouldn’t be very large and usually don’t happen very often. And to remind you – if the value seems enormous, make sure that you have done your math correctly and that you know all the circumstances (like the NBA team news) you are placing the wager in.
But what should be the base stake?
The answer to this question actually depends on the level you are at as a punter. No matter how big your betting fund is, you should stake about 1.5 percent to 3 percent of it on the single wager. It doesn’t sound all that much, but is designed to help you sustain any bad streak you are almost certainly going to encounter during your tenure as a pro NBA punter.
The more experienced professionals in the industry can go with a more risky 3 percent, but if you are just starting out or if you are not very sure in your mathematical model or the numbers you are using, use a more relaxed percentage. Oh, and use percentage loosely here. If you start up with $1,000 and you use 2% as your base stake, equaling to $20, and lose your first 5 bets, don’t change it up to $18 – the same applies on winning streaks as well. Upon setting the base stake, try going with it for the entire season. If you end up with a significantly larger (or smaller) bank, you can change the base stake at that time.
There are other staking systems you can find in the business. Feel free to use a different one from the one I’m suggesting, just make sure they don’t promise you skies and castles and that they don’t burden your NBA betting fund after a few iterations, like the progressive doubling system.
The uniform betting system will require patience (most good ones do), a true virtue of a pro punter. It’s going to take some time. You probably already know that depending on your bookmaker’s juice size, you’d have to hit somewhere above 50 percent of your bet to be profitable. Of course, you may wait for the three best bets of the season in terms of value, hit two, and brag about your 66 percent hit ratio, but this won’t earn you much money.
Much better approach is to go after all value bets during the season (you will probably end up with 300-500 bets in a single NBA season). If you are hitting your wagers at a 54 percent clip, you’ll end up with about 20-35 stakes in green, meaning that if you had used 2 percent stake on average, your bank will be increased by about the half of it.
That’s an excellent turnaround in most businesses – capital raised by 50% in six months is a hell of an interest. Raised NBA betting fund would also mean that you would raise your stake for the next season (if you would like to and if the bookmaker’s limits allow it), making the non-linear increase in your funds.
Yes, it takes a few years, and a bad NBA season can slow you down, but it’s still a great staking system, simple and efficient. The most common sin of the public bettors is that they want quick money and a good portion of it. That’s why so many people are taking teasers and parlays despite the gigantic juice and extremely small probabilities.
Never go that route – take small, single steps and draw a line after the NBA season to measure up your progress. Treat each wager with the same care and stake them (almost) uniformly to ensure avoiding any subjectivity. It’ll earn you money, save your nerves and enable you to enjoy working in the industry. And there are worse things to do.
