Bankroll Management
Most punters know as much as they need to know about punting so that they win often enough to believe that they are winning punters. Wrong!
The best way to know if you are actually winning is to keep records of your bets, but before we get to that point, we have to know what VALUE is, how to use this mysterious VALUE, and how to manage the bankroll that we have set aside for our serious punting.
Kenny Rogers sung about knowing when to hold them and when to fold them. We want to be singing about knowing when to invest on a horse and when not to invest. Sometimes you will not invest and your selection will win. Tough.
You only invest on a horse when you are getting better value than the (it should be your) horses probability of winning.
We spoke about setting your tissue prices before having a bet. This is where we use them. If you do not have tissue price you need to have some type of historical statistical guide to did you VALUE bets.
How to calculate TISSUE PRICES.
In the following paragraphs, I will help you discover how much you will need for your punting bank roll.
For the sake of this exercise I will using Stable F from the “From A to I” Table on the home/tips page of this site.
Regardless of whether you are a casual punter just having a dabble on the weekend, a professional punter making a living from the punt or one of the myriad positions in between, you need to have a punting bankroll that is ONLY for punt.
This bankroll is separate from monies you need to pay for the rent, it is not for buying your partners Valentine gift and not even for your weekly slab for the man cave. Your PUNTING BANKROLL is for PUNTING.
I know this may have turned you off already but bear with me and I will help you enjoy your punting more because you will be constantly winning and not constantly depositing into your account.
Your bank roll does not have to be huge. Follow the rules and show some discipline and your bankroll should be a one-time outlay.
The starting point for conducting an analysis on the size of your bankroll is to accept that even the best of punters have losing streaks and that our bankroll must be sufficiently robust to combat these losing streaks.
Bank Roll Management - 1
The following table is based on a real formula and is borrowed from punterspal.com. This table will help us discover what the length of our losing streaks will be and as a result, how large our starting bankroll needs to be.
This table is for Win bets.
When you look at this chart and are thinking about your winning Strike Rate, for starters, calculate that if your Strike Rate is 25%, your average collect is $4.
This indicates that after 100 bets you should have collected 25 times (25% S/R), outlaying 1 unit to collect a dividend of $4, twenty-five times, recouping your outlay.
When doing this exercise be honest and do not kid yourself that your Strike Rate is (or will be) higher than it is. It is best to be conservative at this stage of the calculation. You are best starting with a lower base unit. It can always be increased at a later time.
According to the above chart, a Strike Rate of 25% will mean that sooner or later we will have a losing run of 24 bets.
Before we calculate our starting bankroll amount remind yourself that you could have a losing streak of 24 bets, break that losing streak with one winner and then have another losing streak of 24 bets. Ah!
I recommend that your starting bankroll be 4 times the charted losing streak.
Basing your starting bankroll on just the one losing streak is a recipe for disaster. Many people will recommend a starting balance of 5 times the predicted losing streak but a disciplined punter, like yourself, can get away with 4 times the predicted losing streak.
With a 25% Strike Rate our expected losing streak is 24 bets and this multiplied by 4 is equal to 96. Let’s round this to 100. We now calculate our bank roll. If we have decided that our Unit is equal to $5 our starting bankroll is $500 or 100 x $5.
Our starting bankroll is going to be $500 (or whatever your calculation comes to). The same bankroll management theory, below, will apply regardless of the size of the starting balance.
There are many staking methods that can be applied but to start let’s start with a very simple method, a method that you can easily keep track of on an Excel spreadsheet.
The staking method that we will begin with here will be tied directly to our bankroll balance and it has 2 distinct advantages in both protecting our bankroll and then building our bankroll.
We stated earlier that our $500 bankroll balance is based on $5 bets, so we will use the $5 amount or 1% of the starting balance to commence punting.
As our balance goes up & down, depending upon our results, our investment on each race will stay at 1%.
What do we see from the above result Table? The Table is based on Stable F for August (so far) in 2025.
The stable has had 10 winners from 35 runners, a Strike Rate of 29%, exceeding our expectations.
7 of these 10 winners were not backed as we did not achieve the VALUE price required.
The three winners we backed provided enough VALUE that we in slight profit.
This was helped as there were another 5 horses we did not back as we did not get the value price.
We did not use any “Bet Returns” (6 horses placed 2nd or 3rd) which would have increased the profit.
We did not use any “Price Boosts” where possibly 2 of our non bets could have met the value price.
Our bet amounts have always been 1% of our bankroll balance
You will be able to see how your punting is progressing and by maintaining discipline it should be progressing in the correct direction. By seeing that we can preserve out bankroll I wish to stress that the only way your punting will improve is by keeping records. You may even get some satisfaction from it.
One thing that should appeal to everyone is that as well as having a small profit at this stage we are not looking like we will need to deposit more into the account. Now, for most punters, that is a profit in itself.
Be honest with yourself when deciding on your Strike Rate to calculate your starting Bank Roll.
Be disciplined when betting, follow the rules, if the price is not there, do not have the bet. If you do not have the discipline, get someone else to do the betting for you.
If using the “From A to I” stable selections, do not choose every table, pick one, two or even three and leave it at that. Again, if you lack discipline, by having someone else in charge of your Bank Roll, you will still enjoy the punt because you know what you will be on and be on at the VALUE price.