Become a Football Ironman
We’re into the second half of the NFL season. How’s your bankroll holding up? Are you on a full tank, or are you running on fumes?
The sad truth is, many football bettors have already emptied their wallets. Think of the full 17-week regular season as a triathlon. Everyone starts out hopeful, but through poor money management or a simple lack of handicapping ability (often both in considerable amounts), some people have to give up early. You don’t want to be one of those people. You want to be an ironman.
Whatever shape your account is in, you can maximize your chances for growth by following three simple rules that are completely independent of the games themselves. These strategies have their roots in the financial markets – and we can’t emphasize enough that the sports gambling arena is a marketplace. Unless you gamble purely for entertainment (which is perfectly legitimate, although we do encourage responsible gambling), every bet you place is an investment and should be treated as such.
Our first golden rule about money management: Diversify. Anyone with investments right now in precious metals and U.S. dollars as well as stocks can attest to the absolute importance of not putting all your eggs in one basket. The handicapping equivalent is to avoid making one large wager on a single event. We often talk of betting “units” instead of using hard dollar amounts; some people bet $100 on an NFL game, others $10 or $1,000. The size of your bet should depend on how deep your pockets are. By breaking your account into a suitable number of units, you can withstand the inevitable run of bad beats that happen every season – not just this wacky 2008 campaign.
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Following that logic, the second rule: Never throw good money after bad. If you lose a unit on a bad beat, don’t bet two units on the next game to try to recoup your losses. 
Using any kind of Martingale betting system is a great way to quickly exhaust your bankroll. Even if you use a milder Fibonacci sequence (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8…) of progressive bets, at some point you will run out of money, no matter how deep your pockets are.
Building a bankroll takes more patience than that. It also requires the humility to know that you’re going to make a lot of picks that just don’t pan out. A worthwhile goal for any handicapper is to be right 55 percent of the time. Anything above 52.4 percent is enough to make a profit, factoring in the standard –110 price on a pointspread wager. There are as many as 16 NFL games in a week; betting one unit on each game and going 9-7 ATS is all you need to do to come out ahead. Celebrate even going 8-7. The more often you do that, the sooner you can start betting larger units.
Our third ridiculously obvious rule of thumb: Buy low. Betting lines are subject to change throughout the week as the market fluctuates. The difference in value between, say, Patriots –3 and Patriots –2.5 is impossible to overlook, considering about one in seven NFL games ends in a 3-point margin of victory. Even a slight change in the “juice” you’re charged for a matchup has an effect on your bottom line.
For example, this week’s Denver-Cleveland matchup opened Monday night with the Browns as 3-point favorites, but at a price of –120. On Tuesday night, the juice shifted slightly to –115. This is the book’s way of microtuning the betting line without having to take a half-point off the spread. Paying $115 to win $100 is always better than paying $120 to win $100. But if you like the Browns, do you wait until closer to Thursday night’s kick-off in anticipation of an even better price?
That’s where the art of handicapping comes into play. Some cappers will always be better at this than others, but everyone can benefit by keeping in mind our three ironclad rules of money management. Stay smart, stay in the game.
