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Understanding Fixed and Proportional Betting

Fixed Betting Guide

You may have heard the terms 'fixed bet' or 'proportional bet'. In this article, we quickly break down each of these terms so that you can decide if you'd like to implement them into your betting strategy. If you haven't already, be sure to check out our free sports picks and predictions on which you can test these betting strategies with the help of our experts!

Table of contents

  1. ❓What is a Fixed Bet?
  2. 🔍What is a Proportional Bet?
  3. ✨In Conclusion
  4. ✅More online betting info

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Fixed Bet

If you are new to sports betting, always betting the same amount is an easy solution to reduce your risks, this is what we call the 'Fixed Bet'. 

By setting and sticking with a fixed bet, you protect yourself from judgment errors and are less likely to get lost in the euphoria after a series of good predictions. You also drastically reduce the risk of losing everything.

This risk of your bets is of course lower as your stake represents a small amount of your betting portfolio. We advise you to choose a fixed stake that represents 1% to 5% of your total betting capital. Going beyond this amount is a huge risk and will surely burn you at some point.

The main issue with fixed betting systems is that they don't take into account those times when you are beyond sure of your prediction or the evolution of your strategy/experience as a sports bettor.

Proportional Bet

Choosing a proportional bet (%) on the total amount of your portfolio solves the two drawbacks of the fixed stake system. Betting a certain percentage of your sports betting portfolio allows you to:

  • Scale the amount of your bets proportionally to the size of the portfolio.
  • Change your bets based on your beliefs within a range.

Again, we recommend that you stick to between 1% and 5% of the total amount of your portfolio for each bet!

To Conclude

These two basic systems have the main advantage of being simple to use. Their major disadvantage is that they do not take the specific risk of each bet into account. As you know, you do not have the same chances of winning your bet at odds of -150 and at odds of +1000. The probability that the predicted event will occur must be taken into account when choosing the bet.

To adapt your stake to the quality of your predictions and the odds you are betting at, the Kelly Criterion is a better system.

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