How to keep betting records
To keep in control of your betting activity and assess whether your initial betting goals are on track, you should always keep a record of the bets you have placed. This is an approach taken by professionals and casual gamblers alike as it makes sense to use betting records to ascertain what areas they are profitable in as well as other analysis. .
Unless you have a phenomenally good memory with which to store and recall such information, you should keep detailed betting records. Initially, you should record as much information as possible; you can always discard superfluous information in future versions of your records. Some suggested items that you record are:
Because of the built-in formulas that can help remove the tediousness of the work, and the possibility of reusing your existing experience, many people choose to use MS Excel for their record keeping. For those who may bet on devices in multiple locations, it may be worth looking at a cloud solution such as MS One Drive or Google Drive, so you can access and update your records from any device. You may prefer to start from scratch or adapt an existing spreadsheet. If you are just starting off with record keeping, there are a number of example spreadsheets available to download on the web. Here’s an example of one. An Excel spreadsheet that contains macros but is fairly straightforward:
The best approach is to spend a few minutes every day updating your records, rather than letting it build up to such an extent that it becomes too burdensome a task. The motivation for keeping records should increase when your records begins to provide you with clear insights into your gambling.
When analysing your losing bets, do you see any patterns developing? Is it a certain market type or sport that you are consistently losing on? If this is the case, your records can help you decide whether to eliminate this from your betting activity, or to persevere with it, albeit proceeding with caution. Try turning the data for a particular betting strategy into a chart to give you a visual depiction of what’s going on. The chart will zig-zag, as losses are inevitable, however is the overall trend over time upward or downward?
Similarly, by analysing your winning bets do you see a type of betting activity that shows a consistent winning pattern and should you be devoting more funds to it? Be dispassionate, did bets win because you implemented your edge or were they simply fortuitous and should be discounted as “noise”.
Decide when and how often to analyse your records. For example you might pick 100 bets as your initial and subsequent bet review increment. It may be that you decide to look at them on a monthly basis. You need to have placed sufficient bets to give patterns time to develop but leave it too long and the more damage a poor strategy can do to your bank balance.
An alternative to using a spreadsheet to keep your betting records is to use the data provided by the betting operator or betting exchange. At bet.me, we provide in-depth records, charts and betting tools and we offer the ability to download your betting data to get full visibility of your trading activity. At-a-glance, you can see your profit and loss, commission generated and much more from bets placed on the bet.me exchange. Other betting exchanges may provide something similar but to obtain it, you may have to request this via phone/e-mail or within the My Account section of their platform.
If it ultimately increases your profit by highlighting your most successful strategies, record keeping will turn from a chore to a way to maintain your edge.
The bet.me exchange provides free, easy to use charts to help you understand your betting activity on our exchange, as well as giving you the ability to download your data to a spreadsheet for further analysis. You can keep up to date with the latest developments for bet.me by signing up to our mailing list at Sign Up
Yes, you. We’re always looking for new authors. If you’ve got great articles/news that will be of interest to our readers and help to move our betting exchange forward, we would love to hear about them. Our aim is to bring readers a fresh perspective on all things betting. We want your article to be at its best. Once accepted, you’ll get extensive feedback from our team.