A natural part of playing online casino is dreaming about being profitable. That is exactly what this guide will help you become.
Being a part of a larger series of articles discussing how to win in an online casino, this guide aims to cover one of the most important yet difficult parts of earning money from gambling.
Most gambling guides out there offer one or more article on this subject, all of which provides more or less useful information. However, after scrolling through them all we felt the need to provide our readers with a truthful and down to earth edition.
Using mathematics, common sense and strategy, we will help you learn how to protect your casino balance or bankroll as the Americans call it.
Without any guarantees of a profit in gambling, protecting your balance is one of the most important things you can do to both be profitable and enjoy the entertainment of playing online casino.
Let’s start off this article with some of the most basic aspects of protecting you from big chunk losses. You will quickly realize that protecting your balance and becoming a responsible gambler share many similarities.
Contents
1. ESTABLISH A LOSS LIMIT
The first step towards protecting your money is to establish a loss limit. This is a decision you make prior to opening up a slot machine, live casino game or start filling in your bet slip.
The common way to do this is by making sure there is no more money in your casino account than you are comfortable losing during your playing session.
To decide this, we recommend that you take your personal finances into account, and set a limit within the range you can afford to lose.
In modern online casinos, setting a loss limit is actually something you can do in your profile settings. Regulators such as the Malta Gaming Authority has put great emphasis on the importance of such a tool through many years, resulting in this nice feature.
When you set a loss limit, you have to be aware of a few things. This loss limit is a final decision. If you have lost it all within the time period it is set for, you cannot play again before time expires.
If you want to change your loss limits, it takes a minimum of 7 days before the change goes through. This is to protect you from irresponsible gambling behaviour.
2. SET A TIME LIMIT
Similar to setting a loss limit, a time limit is something you decide on before you open any game. When you gamble, time flies by very quickly, which may result in it being more difficult to quit within a reasonable time. It may also be that what you considered a reasonable amount of time before you started playing, no longer feels reasonable when you play.
This kind of behaviour is not problematic on its own, as it is a very common thought when you are having fun. However, in combination with other factors, it can put your bankroll at risk.
In addition to the loss limit, MGA has underlined the importance of setting time limits for many years, which has resulted in time limits also being available in your profile settings with online casinos regulated by them.
The same rules apply to time limits when you want to change them. It takes a minimum of 7 days before the changes are applied. However, this only applies if you want to increase the limit. If you want to lower your limit, the changes are applied immediately.
3. SCHEDULE AN ACTIVITY AFTER GAMBLING
Step 3 in our guide about how to protect your bankroll from going empty is strongly related to what we discussed above in the section about time limits.
Unless the online gambling site you play with has a function to digitally set a time limit or for some reason, you don’t want to set it that way, your time limits become something you have to enforce on your own.
It is common to find this difficult as time feels faster when you are having fun or you are simply doing something you like.
A good way to help you enforce your own limits is to make sure you have something scheduled right after gambling. This gives you an additional incentive to finish on time and stop gambling within your own limits.
A general piece of advice when it comes to what you can schedule is that it should either be important or fun to make sure you don’t decide to skip it midway through playing online casino.
Doing this will help you stay in control of your bankroll and help you avoid long losing streaks. It’s also a piece of very helpful advice in regards to avoiding chasing your losses.
4. DIVERSIFY YOUR BANKROLL
As you may understand, protecting your gambling bankroll is closely linked to setting limits. Our step 4 is no different, as it will help protect you from losing all your money in one gambling session.
Diversification of your bankroll is about chopping your real balance into smaller pieces. A common way to solve this is by only keeping your loss limit per session in your gambling account. The rest is either transferred to your bank account or e-wallet.
You never know when a game is hot and when it’s cold. These are common expressions in gambling and refers to the time periods a game pays out a lot and when they don’t pay out what they normally do.
That is why we also recommend another level of diversification. When you only have your loss limit available to play for, you can split the balance into even smaller pieces. These pieces can be dedicated to different games.
An example of 2-level diversification
A player has a bankroll of 10.000. Because the loss limit of that person is only 4.000, he withdraws 6.000 into his e-wallet, leaving him with 4.000 to use for gambling. Level 1 is completed.
Before the player starts playing, he decides to split his bankroll into 4 equal pieces. He then goes ahead and selects the games he wants to play.
The result is that he is willing to spend 1000 on game 1, 1000 on game 2, 1000 on game 3 and 4000 on game 4.
5. USE PERCENTAGE UNITS OF YOUR BANKROLL
A common mistake among online casino players is to set your bet level according to the starting balance and stick to it until the account is empty.
It goes without saying that this way of determining bet levels are not sustainable and that it’s not a viable strategy when looking to protect your bankroll.
As an alternative, we want to present you with percentage units as a solid option. This technique will contribute both to balance protection and towards you becoming a more responsible player.
It can also increase your entertainment as it will increase the number of spins and game rounds you can play or bets you can place.
Here at AllGambling, we recommend using 1% of your bankroll as 1 unit. If you have 1.000 in your account, the perfect bet size becomes 10, resulting in a minimum of 100 spins or game rounds.
If you need the potential of ´bigger wins to find online casino entertainment, you can easily adjust 1 unit to be 2%.
Won’t this become difficult, having to recalculate my units all the time? The short answer is, no. Before you start, you can for example decide to recalculate your stake when your bankroll goes down to 750, 500, 250 and so on.
Below is an example of bet size calculation using percentage units to determine how much you should bet each betting round.
| Money balance | ||
|---|---|---|
| Up to 1000 | ||
| Between 1000 & 2500 | ||
| Between 2500 & 5000 | ||
| Between 5000 & 7500 | ||
| Between 7500 & 10000 |
6. PLAY PROFITABLE GAMES ONLY
One of the most common effects of gambling online is narrowing down the list of games you play. You develop favourites based on features, design, music and how lucky you have been on that game.
The games that become popular aren’t always the most profitable games. This is because other things than money go into creating enjoyable gaming experiences.
The casino game providers are fully aware of that, which is why they spend money and effort on developing new concepts all the time. The potential gain for them is more players and fewer payouts.
When working on protecting your balance, it’s important to look beyond the most popular games and start looking at data.
More specifically, we need to look at the games promising the highest RTP (Return to Player) or the lowest house edge if you want to look at it that way.
Discipline is key also when it comes to the games you play, not only when setting limits and stick to them.
With a 100% RTP, you get a 50/50 chance of making a profit. No such game exists, so the goal is to find games with an RTP as close to 100% as possible.
One good example of this is blackjack. When played with both a decision strategy such as basic blackjack strategy in combination with card counting and a betting system such as the Martingale System, blackjack has a 99.60% RTP. You can learn how to do this in our article about how to use strategy in an online casino.
If you’d rather play slot machines, Book of 99 offers an RTP of 99%. To gain 99% RTP in Book of 99, you have to protect your balance in order to reach the bonus round, as the secret sauce in this slot machine lies there.
7. PARTICIPATE IN TOURNAMENTS
When talking about protecting your gambling bankroll, we often discuss how you can minimize your losses. Now, however, we will give this article a much-needed breath of fresh air, with some advice on how you can increase your balance.
In sports, they say that the best defence is to attack. Sometimes, this saying is true when it comes to online gambling.
The best way to prevent emptying your casino balance is to win a lot, often. Tournaments held by online casino operators or game providers gives you a solid chance to win some extra cash while playing.
That is why we recommend checking out the online casino’s promotion pages every time you log into your account.
If you have decided to play anyway and you find an opportunity to win extra cash by playing a game already providing a high RTP, you should definitely sign up for that tournament and begin your mission to become number 1.
8. KEEP YOUR CREDIT CARD AT A SAFE DISTANCE
We apologize in advance but for step 8 on your journey to protect your casino balance, we have to go back to discussing responsibility again.
Never have we ever met someone that enjoys losing. Some parents claim they like losing to their children, but deep down we all know they hate it.
Winning and losing is a natural part of playing online casino games and betting on sports. It might be that last symbol that never drops the way it should or a late goal in a football game going to the wrong team.
Either way, it feels bad not to win and a lot of people wants revenge. In gambling, we use the expression ‘cover your losses’ when we discuss the feeling of revenge. It’s common and it happens all the time.
When this happens it’s crucial that you don’t have easy access to your preferred deposit method. It will make it more difficult to make immediate deposits and the walk over to get it may give you the time needed to reconsider.
Knowing that you could just make a new deposit when things start going south is a dangerous road to walk on when your goal is to protect your bankroll.
9. KNOW WHEN AND WHAT TO WITHDRAW
Being an online casino player it’s important to understand that bankroll protection is just as much about keeping your winnings as it is to prevent losses.
This will most often be the difference between profitable and non-profitable gameplay. A trick online casino streamers and other experienced players have been using for years is knowing when and how much to withdraw.
Imagine starting off with an early bonus round win. Your balance immediately goes up and everything feels great. Continuing to play when this happens is a mistake if you want to protect your balance.
The best move to make now is to stop playing. However, if you have set aside 1 hour and you won after 5 minutes, we understand that it is difficult to stop.
That is why we suggest that you withdraw your original balance at this point. Imagine that you started off with 1.000 in your account. The bonus round win brought your balance up 750 which gives you a total of 1.750 in your bankroll.
By withdrawing your original 1.000 at this time, it becomes impossible to make this game round non-profitable, no matter how bad your luck is from here on out.
