Bankroll management: how much to bet, how to survive variance and when to withdraw

What a bankroll is

Money set aside for betting, kept in betting accounts and in a wallet used for nothing else, whose loss you have already accepted. Living money, savings and credit are not a bankroll. The number itself matters less than the rule: stakes are a fraction of it, and the fraction is fixed in advance, not after a loss.

The unit

Divide the bankroll into units. One percent is conservative, two percent is standard, five percent is what people do before they learn. With a 1,000 bankroll a unit is 10 or 20; every bet is one, two or at most three units, and the size is decided by confidence, not by the desire to get even.

The rules that keep a bankroll alive

• No chasing. A loss does not change the next stake. The single largest cause of ruin is the bet placed to recover the last one.
• No topping up. If the bankroll is gone before the month ends, the month is over. Deposit limits at the operator enforce this better than willpower; set them on the day you register.
• Withdraw on a schedule. Take profits above the starting bankroll out every month, into a bank account that is not connected to betting. Money left in an account is money that will be bet.
• Spread across operators. Two or three accounts, none holding more than you can lose to a frozen withdrawal, and none holding a balance at a Curaçao licensee for longer than needed.
• Keep the record. Without a record you do not know your win rate, and without a win rate you cannot size a stake; our tracking guide shows what to log.

Growing it

If stakes are a percentage of the current bankroll, they grow with it and shrink with it, which compounds a winning record and protects a losing one. Recalculate the unit monthly, not daily; daily recalculation turns every good week into larger bets and every bad week into smaller ones, which is the opposite of what a bettor with an edge wants. Our staking guide compares flat, percentage and Kelly stakes.

When to stop

When the record shows no edge after several hundred bets, the honest conclusion is that the betting is entertainment, and the bankroll should be sized as an entertainment budget: what you would spend on a hobby, no more. There is nothing wrong with that; there is a great deal wrong with pretending otherwise.