March Madness Management

Sat, Mar 12, 2016
by SportsAdvising.com

In this section I will cover the common mistakes by bettors that can dwindle a bank roll much faster than building it up. During this frenzied season of betting for college basketball, it is key to avoid certain mistakes. We have all made these mistakes. It is all part of the learning process to become more profitable in the long run. Avoiding these situations will allow more cashes at the betting window and less trips to the ATM. Just because the best bettors are around the 60% range does not mean every day is a 3-2 day. There will be days of 5-0 and days of 0-5. By avoiding these methods below, you can avoid the pitfalls that most bettors fall into.

1)CHASING

This is the ultimate sin of sports betting. Everybody that has placed bets is guilty of doing this. Having the resistance to chase during a bad day or week will save your bankroll and keep you in the black in the long run. Let’s say you are a $110/game bettor and play an average of 3 games per day. Each day you are risking $330 in an effort to bring back $300 profit for a total of $630. If you go 0-3 and lose your $330 you might decide to “chase” the next day by betting $220/game. If you go 1-2 that day you would lose $240. You have now gotten to a point where the next day you want to chase again and bet $330/game in order to try to make up the $570 you are down. If you go 1-2 again on this day. You lost $360 and are now in the red $930. It would take a streak of 10-0 using your original bet amount to get back to making a profit. If this bad stretch occurred over 3 days and you went 2-7 it is a winning percentage of 22%. In order to get your money back by going 10-0, and being 12-7, you would be at 63%. 63% playing your normal bet of $100 would allow you to be up $430. The odds of going 10-0 just to get back to even are highly unlikely. As you can see, chasing will dig you a deep hole that is very difficult to climb out of.

2)DOUBLE DOWN

Another common mistake we have all made is the “double down.” This occurs after winning an early game and wanting to place a bigger bet on the game later in the day. So let’s use the $110/game scenario again. In this situation you bet two early college football games and cash both as winners. The $220 you risked is now $420 for a $200 profit. Your confidence is high and the night game looks like a rock solid play. Instead of playing the normal $110 on it, you decide to play $220 on it. The game loses and instead of having a $90 profit on a 2-1 day, you are now stuck with a $20 deficit while going 67%. The feeling of having a winning record and losing money will lead to chasing and making bad bets. You will feel like you need to get back the money you should be up and the chase begins. Now you might be asking, “How do I take the next step of increasing my wager amount?” Very good question. Let’s say you have a month where you profit $950. You are up, essentially 9 units, and have some leeway to increase your bet to say $165. If you have another profitable month, you can increase to $220. Say the following month does not go as well, you can drop back down.

3)PARLAYS

STOP. DO NOT PARLAY. Playing multiple games together on a parlay is a bad idea. The only time you should ever do a parlay is when you are doing big favorites on the money line. Some games it will be tough to lay 10 points with the favorite, but you can do a parlay of multiple 10 point favorites on the money line. This will be very rare. But, when it comes to parlaying multiple teams with the points, STOP.