Blackjack Bankroll Management Tips

Bankroll management is important for every gambler, but especially for the blackjack advantage player. You are not here to play casually. You are gambling to make money. But this also means you need to bring in more money as you will be playing on a regular basis. Here are some tips to help you manage your bankroll.

Bankroll Management Tip 1 - Set a monthly gambling allowance.

Budget your blackjack gambling as you would anything else in your life. Set aside no more than you can really afford. However, you need to understand that for long-term advantage playing, you will need a sizeable bankroll to start with. If not, your play will be crippled and you will never be able to play through your plan. So from the start, decide if you have how much it takes to do this. If you are playing blackjack and are into card counting, a $1-$60 dollar betting spread needs a bankroll of about $3,000 to start.

Bankroll Management Tip 2 - Use basic strategy always.

Basic strategy is there for a reason: to save and make money for you! You must follow basic strategy no matter what happens and no matter what your guts say. Guts play no role in advantage gambling and blackjack. It is all math-based. Even if you keep losing when you follow the strategy, stick to it. It may be okay to listen to your hunch if you are playing short term. But advantage playing is a long term affair. Long term means the house advantage will be felt so you must stick to basic strategy. This will help your bankroll a lot.

Bankroll Management Tip 3 - Play single-deck games.

As a card counter, you will make more money playing a few hours of single deck blackjack than a week with shoe games. Even if single deck games are hard to come by, keep practicing counting systems that are optimized for such games. When you do find them, pounce on them as the gold is there. Just make sure they are NOT the yucky 6-5 blackjack games.

Bankroll Management Tip 4 - Understand expectation and standard deviation.

What this means is that the mathematical expectation for wins and earnings rarely apply in actual games. This is confusing but to give an example: A coin toss has 50/50 odds of heads or tails. Yet if you toss a coin a hundred times, chances are it will not be exactly 50-50. Most likely it will be about 55-45 or something around that figure.

It's the same with blackjack and advantage gambling. Just because card counting is supposed to give you a slight edge over the house, that does not mean you will win every time! This is what you need a big bankroll for. Some days you will win a lot more than expected, other times you will just lose - and lose a lot. But over the long term, if you stick to your plan, you WILL make a good profit.

Hopefully these bankroll management tips will help you stretch your budget. Sooner or later, the big win will come to you and the comps will start to look really good. But until then, you have to properly manage your bankroll so you live to see your best gambling days.