If you truly want to bet professionally you MUST, I repeat MUST, have a dedicated akskybet bank which is kept entirely separate from your own everyday funds.

It should be an amount that you can afford to lose. If you follow the steps I will outline in this course, it is unlikely you will lose your bank but you should always be prepared for the absolute worst possible outcome.

The size of your betting bank will be dictated by the amount of money you are willing and able to dedicate to your betting. It will also be dictated by how much you are prepared to lose if the unthinkable happens.

Guard your betting bank jealously – it is the most important tool you have.

You must place your betting bank into an entirely separate bank account set up for this purpose alone (ensure that the account has a debit card facility) Do not repeat one of my early mistakes. When I first started getting serious about my betting, I kept a dedicated betting bank but stupidly kept the funds in my personal bank account. It got very messy and had an adverse effect on my betting psychology. When you encounter a long losing run it really is best not to see this impacting upon the funds in your everyday account. It becomes very much more stressful than it would be if you were losing the money from an account solely dedicated to your betting activities. Furthermore, when you have had a good win, there is a temptation to up your general spending as you are feeling flush.

Please don’t underestimate the importance of this. Once I realised the importance of totally separating my betting finances and my personal finances, my betting became significantly more profitable. It eased the psychological pressure and made me more aggressive in my selection and staking.

How Many Points?

The number of betting points you require in your bank will be dictated by the betting systems and methods you are using.
If you are using a method which has a long term win strike rate of 40% you will need to break your bank down into far fewer points than if you were using a method with a 15% win strike rate. Always be cautious when deciding this and split your bank into considerably more points than you ever feel you will need. The example below should help you when making this crucial decision:

You are following a selection process which has shown itself to have a long term win strike rate of 30%. Your bank should be broken down into a sufficient number of points to weather your longest statistically likely losing run. Below, I have listed the longest losing runs you are likely to encounter (per 1000 bets) for a variety of strike rates:

From these figures you should be able to get a good idea of the size of bank required. With a 30% win strike rate statistically you are likely at some point to encounter a losing run of 19 bets. Now say you were to allocate a 20 point bank for use with this particular selection method – you can see that you could rapidly get into huge trouble with such a small bank if you were to have your 19 bet losing run. This is where caution must be exercised. I would suggest a betting bank of at least 100 points for a method showing a strike rate of 30%. A safe rule of thumb to apply – your betting bank points should be 5 x your maximum expected losing run.