Why Sports Betting is Like a Marathon

With all of the exaggerations in the media today with the "Guaranteed Wins of the Decade" or the "10 Star Locks of the Week", the average sports bettor may find it hard distinguishing fiction from reality.With the promises of turning a small amount of money into thousands overnight clouds their judgment.The sad part is that this isn't the reality in most cases.If you really want to be successful with sports betting then you need to start thinking of it in terms of a marathon and not a sprint.Like the kids book The Tortoise and the Hare, slow and steady wins the race.

I am approached by people quite often asking if it's possible to really make money from sports betting and my answer is always the same: Yes with a big BUT.You need to be very disciplined, manage your bankroll properly and follow a winning sports betting system.What they are really trying to find out is that without putting in a lot of effort, if it is possible to make a lot of money from sports betting.To this I can honestly answer Yes and No.

So let's say you decide to make your sports betting goal $10,000.Here are the 2 ways that you can achieve this goal.

Option1 - Choose a game to bet on from your favorite sport.Pick the team that you like and bet $11,000 and cross your fingers.If the team wins you just made your goal of $10,000.If you end up losing this bet then you would have lost $11,000 and a mile of away from the $10,000 target.This is definitely not the path that I would recommend as it comes with too much risk.Large sums of money can be won or lost extremely quickly using this method.

Option2 - Take that same $10,000 that you used for option 1, but instead of risking it all on just one team you can spread it around on several games.My suggestion would be to bet 5 percent of your bankroll on any given team.The plan is to use the power of compound interest with modest gains to obtain the $10,000 objective.In this example let's say that you bet on only 2 games per day and a total of 14 teams per week with a conservative winning % of only 57%.Here is how it would look:

Bankroll $10,000
Bet Size 5% $500
# Games 14
Win % 57%
Wins 8
Losses 6
Win $$$ $4,000
Loss $$$ $3,000
Vig 10% $300

Net Win $$$ $700
% Increase 7%

So if we stick with the numbers from this conservative example of 57% win rate while increasing you bankroll by 7% each week, you should be able to achieve this goal in just under 11 weeks.This option may take a bit longer, but you are never really putting your bankroll at risk.I don't know about you, but I like the safe and sure way and the great part is that once you have increased your bankroll by 100% then your bets now would be $1000 instead of $500.
Now just imagine if you bet on more teams per week and that you could increase your winning % to 60%.You achieve that 100% increase at a much quicker rate then the 11 weeks from above.