How To Manage Your Casino Bankroll Effectively
Casino bankroll management is all about taking care of your money for long enough to give you the chance of hitting a winning streak. If you bet too big for your bankroll, you might not last long enough to give yourself a chance at stacking some chips. Bet too small and the games will lack excitement and the wins will become meaningless.
This article explains how to manage your casino bankroll effectively, whether you play at live casinos or online. First, you’ll find out about the two key factors working against you: variance and the house edge. After this, I will suggest some ways to organize your bankroll to get the maximum play out of your cash in terms of which stakes you can play at with certain amounts of cash. After this there are some words about stop loss casino bankroll strategies, followed by some very old and very good advice concerning gambling only with money you can afford to lose.
The Fundamentals
Casino games have a built-in house edge. You can have wins in the short-term, though, over a long period your luck will revert to the average and the house will win in the end. On top of the built-in edges, players often make mistakes, which again hand money to the house.
Most of us who enjoy casinos want to experience meaningful wins and ensuring that your bankroll is big enough to withstand the small and constant pressure from the house edge gives you enough ‘play’ to experience winning streaks now and again.
What you need to add to this is the concept of variance. This is just a fancy way of describing the chance fall of cards or roll of dice. There will be times when you rake in chips and others where the dealer wins so often that you’ll wonder what is going on. These are natural swings of fortune and some solid bankroll management is exactly what is needed to make sure that variance does not see you going broke.
How Many Bets
There are a lot of factors which affect how many bets for a particular game you should take with you to the casino. The key to calculating this is the house edge + possible player errors and the number of hands per hour.
For example: if you play blackjack, the house edge with probably be low, around 0.5%, with perfect strategy. However, very few players will play perfectly in every spot, giving the house anything up to 4%. If you are betting $10 units, and playing 35 hands per hour, then with splits and doubles you are probably turning over $500 or $20 per hour pressure from the house edge. Over an average 5 hour session, you’ll spend $100.Next, and more importantly, the effects of variance on your bankroll can be large. If you start with $200 (20 bets) it would only take a small bad run of busts or dealer hitting 21s for you to lose 10 bets. All of a sudden you are not comfortable with the stakes only having 10 bets left to play. I recommend at least 30 bets for blackjack for this reason and preferably a little more.
Many games have higher house edges and many others (like roulette when betting on individual numbers or groups of numbers) have higher variance.
The message here is that you need to ensure you have good number of bets in your casino bankroll. The key is to find a balance between stakes you enjoy playing at and a bankroll which is robust enough to withstand the natural swings in the game.
Stop-Loss Strategy
A stop-loss system involves moving down in stakes (or stopping completely) after you lose a certain amount. This acknowledges the fact that life can be one long casino session and you hold an overall bankroll, which you take a proportion of on each visit.
You can factor in the number of bets to your stop-loss system. To go back to the Blackjack example, if you start with 30 bets for the $10 game, then hit a rough patch, you can always set a loss limit that ties-in with having 30 bets for the $5 game and move tables at that point. This works the other way too. If you go on a hot streak and end up with enough for the $25 game, then why not take a shot?
The classic stop loss is a set amount of money that – if you lose it – will trigger you to pack-up, go home and watch a movie instead. This works well for many people. Note that if you are the type who tends to chase losses or get irritated when things do not go your way, then you are probably better off using the moving down your stakes at certain points system.
Old Advice Is Good Advice
The money in your casino bankroll should be money that you can afford to lose. You should never gamble on credit or with money needed for other things.