Units and your bankroll
Picking good bets is half the job. The other half is deciding how much to put on each one, and that half is where most bettors go broke. Two words handle it: bankroll and unit.
Your bankroll
Your bankroll is the money you set aside only for betting: money you could lose without it touching rent, bills or savings. It's a budget, not a target. If it runs out, you stop; you don't top it up from somewhere else to win it back.
Units
A unit is your standard bet size, written "u". The usual convention, and the one Consensus Edge uses, is that 1 unit is 1% of your bankroll. With $2,000 set aside, 1u is $20; with $5,000, 1u is $50. Stakes are quoted in units so the same advice fits any bankroll: 1.5u is $30 to one person and $75 to another, but the same share of each.
Units also keep your results honest. "I'm up $300" means little until you know what was bet. "I'm up 6 units over 200 bets" can be compared with anyone's.
Why small and steady survives
Every bettor has losing streaks, good ones included. Someone who wins 55% of their bets at −110, a rare long-run record, will typically hit a losing run of about 7 in a row somewhere in 500 bets. That isn't a problem to fix; it's what 55% looks like (see variance). Losing runs are not the whole story, either: with wins mixed in, a good bettor's bankroll can still slide 10 to 25 units from its high before recovering.
Small stakes are what carry you through that run to the wins on the other side. At 1u a bet, 7 straight losses cost 7% of your bankroll. Betting 10% of your bankroll each time, the same run costs more than half of it. Three habits keep you in the first group:
- Keep stakes small and steady. Most bets around 1u, and rarely more than a couple of units.
- Never chase losses. Raising your stake to win back a bad day is the fastest way to empty a bankroll. The next bet doesn't know about the last one.
- Size from your bankroll, not your mood. If your bankroll grows or shrinks a lot, update the number and let the units follow.
Consensus Edge's suggested stakes follow the same idea. They scale with the size of the edge and your risk setting, and they're kept small by design. How that size is worked out is a Level 3 topic.
Where to set it
Set your own bankroll on the board, and the suggested stakes re-size to match, shown in units and in dollars. Say you set aside $1,200: 1u is $12, so a 1u suggestion is a $12 bet and a 0.5u one is $6. Use the money you have really set aside, not the amount you hope to win.
Example. Two friends each set aside $1,200 for the football season and make the same picks (illustrative, not live data). One sets a $1,200 bankroll, so 1u = $12, and bets about 1u a game. The other bets $120 a game, 10% of the same bankroll.
| About 1u ($12) a bet | $120 a bet | |
|---|---|---|
| After 7 straight losses | down $84 (7%) | down $840 (70%) |
| Left to bet with | $1,116 | $360 |
| Next bet at the same size | about 1% of what's left | a third of what's left |
Same picks, same luck. The only difference was stake size, and only one of them is still comfortably in the season.