Much like poker, blackjack bankroll strategy is fairly straightforward. The first thing you’ll want to do is to determine how big a bet you’re comfortable placing on a regular basis. You can calculate this by dividing your bankroll amount by an arbitrary number. The higher the number you use to divide with, the more conservative your bets are going to be.
Let’s say you’ve got a bankroll of $2000 that you can invest in the game. If you divide that by 200 bets, then you’ve got a bet size of $10. If you’re a beginning player that wants to get the most action though, I’d recommend sticking to a betting unit of $5, that way you can place 400 bets and really begin to understand the ins and outs of the game. Also, with a smaller betting unit, you can create a betting spread that goes up in units of five to $20.
You’ll also want to determine how high (or low) your loss limit is for any given session of gambling. Your loss limit is a predetermined percentage of your total bankroll that you’ll use for betting in any one gaming session. Nobody wants to use their entire bankroll in one turn at the tables.
My personal method is to determine how many times I want to play in a week (six) and divide half my bankroll by that amount. That way, I have a nice cushion to fall back on. So if I have just put $2000 in my bankroll, I’d divide $1,000 by six, which is around $167 per session. That may not sound like a lot, but if I place smaller bets, it can last me a while. That’s the great thing about online casinos: they don’t have the overhead so you can place smaller bets.
There’s a flip side to bankroll strategy, and it’s a good one. If you start winning, you need to have a predetermined amount of money or goal that you want out of your gambling session; this is you “win limit” amount. I honestly play to have fun more than anything else, so I keep it equal to the bankroll I bring into the session. If I start with $167 and end up with a total of $335, then I stop playing. That way I get out while the getting is good and the casino doesn’t get that money back from me.
Knowing when to stop playing in any given session is perhaps the most important skill to becoming a successful blackjack player. With good blackjack bankroll strategy, you can make sure stay on the winning side of the equation.