Just like in the stock market, where portfolios are made to mitigate risks and optimize bankrolls, a lot of the same ethos can be applied to betting on sports. From the casual weekend NFL bettor to the expert strategist who only bets on +EV and uses the Kelly criterion to size their stakes. Creating a portfolio for your betting does not necessarily mean creating large data sheets and spending hours on end delving into a backlog of information. Unless that is what you want to do, that is.
Our approach to betting combines key aspects of this analytical approach, but without compromising the entertainment factor of betting, and the emotional aspect that betting on sports is bound to bring up. Creating a harmony of betting strategies, mathematical stake sizing, and giving ample weight to your gut instinct and betting preferences can be as complicated or as simple as you like. On this page, we will essentially run through a “best hits” of our top strategies, and explore the ways in which you can integrate them into your strategy, thus creating your very own personalized sports betting portfolio.
Defining Portfolios in Sports Betting
Portfolios, in the stock market are a bundle of financial assets, including bonds, stocks, bonds, and other financial products. Adapting the concept for sports betting, portfolios are more of a combination of bankrolls with strategies, and potentially roadmaps too for the forward-thinking bettors.
You can have one bankroll, one strategy and plan out a linear roadmap for your betting, but using portfolios is really about expanding your horizons with more of these at once.
There is no shortage of betting strategies out there, from the simplest to the most overly complicated and conditional. One of the most common things we see happening is bettors trying to dabble or experiment with too many strategies, without managing these, and then they end up going bust and writing off all of them. It can be a simple case of someone trying a few arbitrage bets, then swapping to +EV value betting, and then switching to mega parlays, testing any new method they learn about to see what works.
But without organisation or any bankroll management, these attempts are unfortunately more likely to end in loss than they are to bring the bettor what they want. Instead of relying on blind luck and changing course at every obstacle or loss, creating a portfolio ultimately braces you for the inevitable, and it is, in fact, something you can factor into your bankroll building plan.
Organizing Your Bankroll
Your bankroll is the basis from which your bets are funded, and shapes the strategies or systems you can use in your betting portfolio. This is capital, and it boils down into two major categories:
- Current bankroll: The amount you start with or currently own in your betting account(s) right now
- Planned bankroll: Increments you plan to add to your current bankroll, and it should be organised
From there, it is possible to deconstruct the bankroll further, into which funds you will use to placed matched bets, how much you use on a particular sport, the funds you plan for your riskier or longshot parlay bets, and so on. Planned bankroll is really just as important, if not more, than your starting point.
Adding funds to your bankroll helps build it, and increase the number of opportunities you can take part in. Bigger bankrolls allow you to spread out your funds across more bets, or indulge in higher stakes betting strategies. But it also means tracking your spending, and the gross earnings becomes more important. Because you want to know your profit margins, and the tactics or strategies that have proved the most successful.
Key Tips:
- Better to have a smaller planned bankroll than none: Lots of bettors just make one top up, and use it til its depleted, or withdraw when they reach big milestones. With no organization or structure, it limits their strategies. Even having a small steady stream of incoming funds is better than sporadic deposits.
- Space out the deposits: Find the right balance of when to deposit, based on your bankroll, your betting strategy, and factor in any deposit boosts which can help enhance your bankroll.
- Think in terms of time caps for deposits: You may find that monthly deposits are better suited to your strategy, as they are easier to track and you can deposit more. But if you bet more frequently and use higher risk odds, it is better to have a more consistent and steady flow of deposits to match this higher volatility. Weekly is better, and avoid daily topups as these are very difficult to track.
- Use deposit limits and responsible betting tools: Stay within your financial means, and use deposit limits to ensure that you do. These tools are there to help you build the framework of your bankroll, and can prevent the more impulsive or FOMO bettors from making reckless decisions.
Looking at the sportsbook banking options is vital for planning ahead. Ideally, you need a sportsbook that provides flexible deposit and withdrawal methods, with low minimum deposit limits if your are making smaller and steadier deposits. Plus, the withdrawal limits should be set nice and high, so you can make fewer but larger payouts when you hit your milestones.
Finding Your Niche in Sports Betting
Using every trick in the book and placng bets on every single tip or +EV wager is a counterintuitive strategy that is more about luck than it is smart betting. What you want to do is make your own luck, and find the wagers or betting strategies that best suit your style of betting.
Arbitrage bettors, for example, don’t bet with their heart or follow betting tipsters. They play the numbers game, and look for discrepancies in the odds to fix returns no matter the outcome. Just a heads up, arbitrage betting is best done with lesser followed sports, and not your NBA or NFL wagers. If you mix in matched betting too, then the conditions become more refined. You have to stick with the sportsbooks that offer the bonuses, and look for other books that will provide the counter, or laying, bets. We aren’t talking about having 2 or 3 betting accounts here, but signing up to 5+, and include a few unregulated books to find even more lucrative bonuses and arbing scenarios.
It is worlds away from value betting, an emerging trend in the US betting scene. These strategies are more poised at either:
a) aggregating the odds to get the juice and fair odds prices
b) assess the statistical information to get a hit rate, and then run this against the odds
The first type of value betting is when you dissect the odds offered at various US books, and then based on their projections, look for the fair value odds. The second looks past the odds, to the statistics and metrics that the sportsbooks use themselves to generate odds. Both are popular, and neither is better than the other – they give you a more insightful analysis of the winning probabilities of any given bet.
Finding your niche is really about exploring the various strategies and betting tactics out there, and testing them with your bankroll, to your style. You may have better success with the ever fluctuating live betting odds. Or, find more lucrative options in betting on specific players.
Expert Insights:
- Experiment with risk: Risk shapes the volatility of your returns. Higher risks means higher volatility, implying you will have fewer wins but they will bring more. Lower risk and lower volatility is a more steady, with a higher frequency of wins and smaller returns.
- Assessing volatility: Generally, higher volatility is better for bigger bankrolls, as you are not depending on reeling in the small wins, but can wait to hit those longshot bets. But so long as you make a robust system, you can incorporate higher volatility bets into smaller bankrolls.
- Straights or Parlays: This is a preference in betting style, but it has a massive impact on your system. In +EV betting and hedged betting, straight bets are more common, as these can be assessed individually and the risk analyzed. But parlays have the potential to bring in the bigger wins, at the expense of higher risk.
- Bet types: Some bettors stick to moneylines and totals, others may be more focused on spreads and betting lines, and there are bettors who focus primarily in player bets. Finding your betting niche is all about working out which bets you have better success in predicting.
- Live and futures betting: Most bettors stick to pregame wagers, but there are huge opportunities to be had in futures and live bets. Futures offer the chance to tinkle with hedged bets and cash out offers throughout the season. Live betting is far more dynamic, and in sports like tennis or basketball, the odds can fluctuate drastically in seconds. It opens up loads of high value and hedged betting opportunities, but it requires an expert eye for detail.
A big part of your sports betting niche is rooted in the sportsbook you pick. It defines the risk, the scope of sports and betting markets you can pick from, and the combining possibilities for your wagers. By that, we mean parlays, SGP bets, round robins, teasers, and other system bets. Of course, for some strategies joining multiple books is more advantageous, making more options and possibilities for hedging wagers.
Creating a System for Your Portfolio
You have your bankroll and have at least one niche or preferred betting strategy to use. Now you can think about creating your portfolio, allocating betting stakes and looking for a longterm strategy. It does not necessarily have to be just one strategy. You can have concurrent betting strategies that have independent bankrolls, betting frequencies, and theoretical ROIs.
All betting systems are bound to hit losses or failure along the road, but this is not as devastating when you plan ahead for these hiccups, and don’t take the losses personally. While there is a skill based element to sports betting, it does not take away the fact that anything can happen when a game starts. Shock player injuries, lapses in concentration, weather conditions, or even the psychological state of the athletes is not something that you can be necessarily predicted. Neither by you or the sportsbook providing the odds.
What you can do is analyze the risk factor of your wagers, and when calculating your potential hit rates, factor in these losses. Keep track of your wagers, and, very importantly, assign risk factors in your backlog. It can be just noting the odds of the bet, or also listing the probability/hit rate that you calculated. But with this, you can properly assess your system.
On the subject of risk, variance is a key player here. It is the percentage or measured deviation from which the real life outcomes differ from their paper odds. For instance, let’s say you are betting on a strong favorite, and the odds for them winning are -200 for each of their next 6 games. That means, they should win 66.67% of the time (based on the odds). If they go on to win 4 of the 6 games, the variance is 0.
Variance is more common in the short run, as the real life outcomes should converge more to the paper form as you gain more results to feed into your analysis. This makes it all the more important to calculate with the bigger picture in mind, and create systems for the long run, and not just on a week by week basis. Likewise, you must have enough input for each system to have a proper analysis of its efficiency. 2 or 3 results will not tell if a specific betting strategy is working for you or not.
Crucial Lessons to Learn:
- Give enough time to assess your system: Give enough time and money to a strategy to find out if it works for you. Variance is more prominent in the short run, and a spell of wins or losses can make it seem like your strategy is fault proof or not good enough. That may not be the case.
- Don’t rely too heavily on tipsters or AI betting picks: These suggested tips are based on hunches, statistical analysis, or any other amalgamation of data, but they do not dictate what will happen on the field. Be wary of tools that give very high EV percentages, or tipsters who are trying to sell specific wagers too hard. Do your own research and don’t use their advice as a guarantee that you will win.
- Take accountability for losses: We learn from losses and from wins, and the hardest part of sports betting is taking accountability. Don’t get emotionally charged from a loss, and certainly don’t allow it to influence you to bet more aggressively. Accept the loss, and analyze whether it was a product of pure bad luck, or if there is something you can alter in your betting strategy to avoid facing a similar loss in the future.
- Value smaller changes over drastic ones: You shouldn’t give up on your betting strategy if you face persistent losses. The problem may be variance, or it may just require a small alteration in your plan. Making drastic changes and switching from hedged betting to value betting, or pregames to live bets, or even straights to parlays is a massive jump. Changing the foundation of your plan basically throws away the work you have done already, and means you are starting from scratch.
- Know your strategies: There are endless betting strategies and tactics that bettors employ. Having a passing knowledge in each is beneficial to all, especially if you can take aspects of the strategies you like and combine them into your own.
These strategies include:
- Hegded Betting
- Mathematical Betting
- Flat Betting
- Arbitrage Betting
- Middles Betting
- Progressive Betting
- Kelly Criterion Stake Sizing
- Value Betting
The Importance of Betting Tools
Betting strategy tools, and supplementary sports betting tools have become a huge industry in the US, and there are scores of AI betting tools out there claiming they can enhance your results. The question you should be asking about these tools is not should I have one or not, but what can they do for me (and are they effective at it).
The higher priced tools have loads of features, from DFS optimizers to arbitrage betting opportunities and even personalized coaches or AI assistants to tweak your personal strategy. But they are only realistically available for high stakes bettors who can spend a good $100 or $200+ per month and still have enough money to stake those betting suggestions.
Just doing the math here, let’s say the arbitrage bet ROI is suggested to be 5% (it can be higher, but we are ruling out offshore books and the hundreds of platforms that are unregulated in the US). If you want to pay for a $200 subscription, you have to roll that 5% on $4,000 worth of wagers (and don’t forget, that money is made by two contrasting wagers, so you need to bet $8,000 dollars’ worth of money).
The more affordable tools tend to either give you a limited smattering of betting strategies and features, or focus primarily on one specific betting strategy. Value betting is really an umbrella term here, and encompasses both assessing the odds and assessing the sports statistics. Another affordable tool is a bet tracker, which will automatically log any bet you place, and display this information in charts and other visual devices. You can find these supplementary tools combined with arbitrage betting software, but also a few value betting tools that incorporate bet trackers.
What Betting Tools Do For You:
- Cut down the research time
- Provide handy betting calculators
- Set up automated bet trackers
- Give you odds movement charts
- Help identify the juice or sportsbook hold
- Cross examine the prices at different books
Finding the right tool is a bigger head hunting job than comparing sportsbooks. This is because you need to think about which tools you need, and how you will use them. Each betting tool has its own set of features, and when it comes to +EV or AI generated picks, they use different formulas to crunch these numbers. Some have more tools, but are limited in their betting markets, such as player props tools that don’t do anything other than get you value player picks.
Don’t buy more expensive tools, if you don’t need specific features, look for cheaper subscriptions or alternative betting tools. Be wary of the +EV and sportsbook coverage, as some tools may include offshore books that alter the +EV evaluation. Also, prioritise the books that have filters and tools that let you customise the picks or features to your liking.
Get Your Betting Portfolio Together
The size of your bankroll, risk preferences, betting frequency and the strategies you employ are fully up to you. Creating a betting portfolio is all about combining these aspects into one solid plan, to make it easier for you to track progress and plan ahead.
You could have one plan, or multiple simultaneous plans. It doesn’t matter if you are signed up at just one sportsbook, or hold accounts with multiple books. The thing that matters is that you are focused on developing your system, and your betting portfolio, and make it successful.
There is no be all end all strategy when it comes to sports betting, and no bettor should underplay the role of luck in the outcomes. Even if you are using a robust and efficient betting system, a series of bad luck or negative variance at your expense can seriously undermine the planning and design of your strategy. That is why it is important to think long term, and where variance or misfortune comes into play, you can take a few additional precautionary measures such as changing various nuances of your plan.
By that, we mean picking other betting markets, altering the amount of risk you use in your plan, or make small amendments to your stake sizes. Even the top tipsters and experts don’t stick to one golden formula. A betting strategy is something that can be polished and adjusted to meet the market requirements, betting trends, and new betting technologies.
Importance of Responsible Gambling
Preceding all betting portfolio advice, we put a strong emphasis on responsible and safer gambling. A betting hobby can become an obsessive and compulsive habit if left unchecked. Especially when you lose and let your cognitive biases or emotional responses spiral out of control. Using betting tools to limit your deposits, control the time you spend betting, and stop you getting carried away is a must. As are:
- Taking regular breaks
- Not betting on impulse
- Not using betting as an emotional regulator (for dopaminergic hits)
- Being able to accept losses
- Not giving in to peer pressure or FOMO on any betting hypes
- Understanding the risks and never underestimating the possibility of loss
With the right mentality towards betting, and a proper understanding of the risks, you are in a better place to make important decisions. Whether it is taking a risk on a longshot bet, or the opposite, and passing on a bet that everyone else is 100% behind. It is your strategy, your betting portfolio, and ultimately, your responsibility.
