Betting Units & Return on Investment
Keeping track of your return on investment is crucial to becoming a successful sports bettor. Without monitoring your progress, it is likely that you are not performing well. Those who make a living from sports betting are meticulous in their accounting practices, treating it as a business. If you are unsure how to track your ROI, let’s review the process to help you get started on the path to success.
Why do it?
The key to losing money in gambling is being disorganized, which is why Las Vegas casinos thrive. Many bettors enter with a plan, but after a bad loss or a few drinks (often provided for free), they quickly stray from their strategy. Successful sports betting requires a slight edge over time, with tightly managed bankroll and adherence to a system. Failure to do so will result in shrinking, rather than growing, funds.
How To Calculate It?
If you’re interested in learning about managing bankrolls, you can check out our other content. In this article, we’ll focus on calculating your return on investment. It’s a simple process – all you need to do is keep track of your wins and losses, as well as your profits and losses. For example, let’s say you bet $300 on the New York Yankees at -150 and $1100 on the Green Bay Packers -2.5 -110. If you won the Yankees bet but lost the Packers bet, you would collect a total of $500 on the Yankees bet (your $300 stake plus $200 in profits) and lose $1100 on the Packers bet. In total, you would have won $200 but lost $1100, resulting in a net loss of $900 on your ledger.
Where To Track It?
Keeping track of your betting history is essential for monitoring your bets and analyzing your patterns. While most sportsbooks offer this feature, if you bet offline or in Las Vegas, using Microsoft Excel or Notepad can be just as effective. By including details such as the sport, time of year, and bet size, you can start to identify trends in your betting. This extra effort may seem tedious, but it is crucial for long-term success in sports betting.
What Are Betting Units?
When you start chatting with other people – especially in forums like SBRForum – you’ll realize that most people talk about their wins and losses in terms of betting units. That’s because everyone bets in different amounts.
For example: let’s say you’re a $100 bettor – you bet in the range of $100 per game – and you have a great weekend. Then on Monday morning, you do a little bit of public bragging and tell people that you’ve swept the board and won $500 or $600 on a great run. That’s fine and dandy, but that means very little to someone who bets $1000 or $10,000 per game. They’re going to look at you and wonder why you’re bragging about small peanuts. Floyd Mayweather bets in the hundreds of thousands, so he’ll scoff at your measly winnings. That’s why it’s important to talk about your wins and losses in betting units.
A betting unit is your average bet. So if you’re a $100 player, that could be one unit to you. Or if you’re a $1000 player, that could be your one unit. That way, if you tell someone that you won five or six units over the weekend, it translates to them, and they can do the math to figure out what that means for them. It’s an anonymous way to make things clear to everyone across the board.