You’ve heard it before. The phrase gets mentioned more than “Brett Favre” on a John Madden-announced football game. However, I’m going to say it again, only because it is the most important thing in this risky game we all play. Money management.

The phrase will bore you to death you’ve heard it so much. It makes you think “I’ve heard this before! What a waste of time writing it all up again.” The only problem is that rarely anyone practices good money management, and when I say good money management, I mean good, CONSISTENT, money management.

I say this because I see it on the forums all the time. People going on about how they had a bad week or two and they’re broke. People saying they don’t have enough money to bet X amount of games, and can only afford to bet 10 games. People who have incredible records, but somehow they never have the winnings to show for it. There’s millions of ways that people can be irresponsible with their money. Vegas doesn’t build billion dollar casinos each year by people being responsible with their gambling money. Those casinos go up because someone loaded up on a lock, or bet 10% per game one bad week, or continued to throw money on parlays looking for the huge payout, or tons of other things you can do. Think to yourself and you can probably figure out a few things that you do that causes you to end up in the red more often than not.

Take myself for example. I’m pretty good at betting football. I didn’t have a losing week since week 7. I started the year with 20 units in my betting account. After taking out 25 units for vacation I was left with just 10 units remaining. 10 weeks of winning in the NFL, not to mention a 23 unit day on January 1st, and some winning here and there in college basketball, and I’m left with 15 units on the season? I’m going to go out on a limb here and just take a guess that these numbers don’t add up. I consider myself pretty good at math. 760 on my math SATs. 150 IQ. Took Algebra in 6th grade. Took college math in 9th grade. Didn’t have to take any college math courses while in college. I’m even pretty good at Su doku. So knowing all of that, I feel qualified to say that there’s something wrong with the equation of 10 winning weeks in the NFL + 23 units won in 1 day = 15 units to wrap up the season.

The sad part is that this is a success story. There are some of you out there who may have won a lot more times than you lost, and inexplicably you’re down, or breaking even. Take last year for me, as an example. I finished the year 60% in the NFL, which was the only thing I bet at the time. I remember betting my final dollars of the season on the Super Bowl, hoping to get as close to even as I could. So what am I doing wrong if I’m winning?

First of all it can’t be the parlays I play each week. I only play a 1 unit 6 team parlay every week for 10 weeks. Sure, I never win, but that huge payout possibility always looks good, and it is fun to blame JP Losman for costing you several thousand potential dollars. Plus, it’s only one unit, right? Wrong.

1 unit each week is 10 units. That plus my 15 puts me up to a total of 25 units I could have had on the season as profit. 6 team parlays are a mirage in the middle of a hot, sandy dessert. (The worst thing right now is that no one is around while I’m writing this. I don’t know how to spell dessert, so to clarify, I’m not talking about a hot, sandy piece of cake…just incase I got it wrong.) You never hit a 6 team parlay. Sure, you’ve heard of it being done. A friend of yours had a friend who won big one time. It was amazing too. He thought he was going to lose it on the last game. Then all of a sudden the team made a great comeback, won on an incredible play, and boom, he’s up a few thousand dollars on a small bet. That’s called a smart play, right?

Really, that’s called luck. If you ever hear of a 6 team parlay win, it’s never easy. It’s always won with “This team made a huge comeback to win!” If you place a bet and lose because a team came back to win, then you’d call that bad luck. Knowing this, why would you spend a unit each week on what amounts to a crap shoot? Maybe this doesn’t apply to everyone, but we are all looking for the big payout here, and I know most of you dabble in parlays more often than not. Just remember, you’re lucky to win a few units each week. Why waste one of them on an extremely low percentage bet? I say this, and maybe eventually I’ll convince myself to do the same.

Then there’s the attractive cousin of the parlay, the teaser. Sure, you feel safer with the teaser. The teaser isn’t as rough as the parlay. It gives a little bit back before the games are even played. You’ve got a huge advantage, and there’s still the chance to win big. It’s almost a “lock.” But one thing has to be known in gambling: there are no locks. They don’t call them teasers for nothing. You think “I’m going to lay down a 3-4 team teaser as a safe bet to win some big money.” Vegas doesn’t like to combine the phrases “safe bet” and “win big money.” The two terms go together just like peanut butter and fish. So you’ll spend another unit on that. That’s another 10 units. That brings me to 35 units.

Next you’ve got the single games. Monday Night Football. Sunday Night Football. Thursday Night Football. These are the worst. You always bet them, even if you don’t have a strong opinion. If there’s a game on Sunday afternoon that you aren’t confident on, then you’ll pass because you know there are more options out there. However, when it’s the only game on that night, you feel obligated to place a bet on the game, even if you have no idea what is going to take place. And because you aren’t satisfied with just one unit, you’ll lay another unit on the over/under, even though you know that you do horrible on the over/under bets. Finally you’ll want to win big, so you’ll parlay the two picks together. Now you’re in a win/lose situation. If you win just one of the bets, then you’re down one unit. You have to win both in order to win big, but the problem is that you were never confident in the game to begin with. Most likely you’ll be down 1-2 units for every 3 games doing this stuff, so for the sake of argument, let’s just say it’s 15 units over that 10 week period. 50 units now.

Sorry if this bored you. Maybe that’s just me. After all, you came really close that one time on your parlay, and if Aaron Brooks didn’t throw that late interception, you would have won and it would have paid for all of your parlays that season. You won that 6 game teaser this season that paid off 6 units, so it makes sense to bet the same thing 10 weeks in a row. You won 2 Monday Night Parlays, so why not do it every Monday night, because that payout was amazing.

The thing about gambling is that you’ll always find yourself telling the heroic stories. “I won 23 units yesterday! I was 24-6 on the whole day! It was incredible!” “That’s great, I don’t understand why you don’t move to Vegas. You could be great with this” they say. Then you think about it. If you’re doing so great, then where is the money to show for it. Why did that 23 unit win put you right where you were a few months ago after your last huge win? You don’t understand how you lost all of THAT money, only to luckily get back to that point. The answer is that you’ll always tell the success stories, but how often do you say “I was down 7 units yesterday. I had a bad day which cost me 3 units, but then I did a stupid parlay, a 6 team teaser, and then tried to win it back on the Sunday night game, only to lose 2 more units.” You never tell it. People ask, you say you did alright, finished just under even, then you explain how it’s all Rex Grossman’s fault. The only person to blame is you. So sit and think about what it is that you do to lose. Think about those parlays. Think about the teasers. Think about the bets you make that you’re uncertain of, but that you make anyways just to make a bet. I’ve done this. That’s only the half of it. After that you’ve got to realize that these harmless bets end up costing you about 2/3rds of your winnings. Think about how much you’ve won this year and multiply it by three. That would be pretty nice, huh? The worst part is that you had it, and you did something to bet it foolishly away.

What about the other stuff I mentioned? One thing that absolutely KILLS me is when people say “I don’t have enough to bet that many games. Cut the list.” I don’t care if your bank roll is $100 or $1000. If you bet 2% per game, you’ve got enough for 50 bets. Sure, that means $2 a bet for a $100 bank roll, and $20 for a $1000 bank roll. The only reason you don’t have enough for 20-30 games is because you refuse to cut your bet amount. This could lead to you cutting out some wins, and keeping more losses. Say you bet 30 games and you have a pretty average day, going 16-14. You’re up slightly, about half a unit. However, when you cut that list down to 10, it’s very easy to cut out a few more wins than losses. Maybe you go 4-6 or 5-5. Either way you lose money, and since you are probably betting 5% or more, that means you’re losing more. Some more math for you. 2% bets * 0.5 unit profit = you’re up 1% for the day. 5% bets * 1 unit loss = You’re down 5% for the day. That’s a difference of 6%. There’s no reason that you don’t have enough to bet a large amount of games, unless you’re betting too much per game.

I also emphasize the word “consistent” because some of us follow the 5% rule every week, but occasionally stray from it, and don’t get back in line until we lose big and it is too late. You never stray from risky behavior when you are winning. Only when the risky behavior bites a huge chunk out of your bank account do you sit there and say “I knew I should have gone back to betting 5% or less or this would happen.” The best thing to do is to try and resist the urges. Don’t bet more than 5% under any circumstances. Maybe you feel confident about the games. Good. Take the units you’d win with 5% bets and be happy with them. Maybe you’re looking to catch up. The worst thing people can do is try to catch up because they tend to make risky moves and bet way to much in the process. Maybe you just are getting greedy and think you’re unstoppable. Everyone loses. You can’t get the 60% without getting the 40%. I won every week in the NFL, although some weeks were just 52% weeks, and that’s a slight loss. That’s extremely lucky for a 10 week stretch, but I paid for it with 40% weeks in other sports. Had I upped my betting percentage I would have lost more than I mentioned above. Thank goodness I didn’t stray from the 5% rule on those occasions.

The final word of advice is don’t load up for a big day. Say you’ve got a slate of games on Saturday that you don’t like, and a slate on Sunday that you love. Well, you want as much money to bet as you can get on Sunday. So what do you do? You bet the games on Saturday, looking to increase your bank roll and get more money to bet with on Sunday. What happens? You lose big on Saturday, and then you either use the big Sunday to bring you back to where you were on Friday, or worse, you try to win big and make some stupid moves on Sunday that put you further in the hole, like 2 team parlays, or betting more on each game only to find out that it wasn’t the dream slate of games you thought it would be.

Maybe the above doesn’t apply to you. Maybe it’s something different. Maybe you load up on a lock, then find it wasn’t as certain as you thought. Maybe you don’t want to bet just 3-5% of your bank roll because it’s too small of an amount and you want to make a big, sexy bet. Maybe you win money one week, then try to double up on your winnings, so you take it back to the table and lay it all on a game you’re certain about, only to lose it all and end up back at the starting point.

The bottom line is that you can have a system that wins 70% of the time. You can have a company that provides you with stats and percentages on how likely a team is to cover a spread. At the end of the day, nothing matters when you don’t practice money management. It’s been said before. It will be said again. Maybe you didn’t get to this point because you’ve read it before and you think it doesn’t apply to you. Maybe you’re at this point and you’re thinking that it still doesn’t apply to you. Maybe it just doesn’t. If so, then you’re one of the very few. I can give you all the football winners in the world, but the best advice I can give you is this: practice consistent money management.