People bet on sports to win money. Even recreational gamblers aim to score some dough, after all that is the object of the game and if one only loses, the game stops being enjoyable. If you win, it means you're playing the game well. You're good at it and there's quite a bit of satisfaction that comes with that.

Successful bettors will tell you that bankroll management has to go hand in hand with proper handicapping and reverse handicapping skills. Regardless of how good one is at locating value in various match-ups, without proper bankroll management all those efforts will be in vain: he won't be able to beat the variance.

In order to understand how bankroll management should work, one needs to understand variance. Beating the variance is the ultimate goal of every successful sports bettor, but it's a much trickier undertaking than it would seem at first glance.

What exactly is the variance through? Variance is basically the difference between various outcomes of the same event over several instances. Variance can be low - in which case the numbers are tightly spread. High variance is about numbers spread on a much larger scale. If one plays a with a certain edge, betting smaller amounts spread out over several bets makes for lower variance than betting large amounts on a few match-ups. For a sports bettor, the lower the variance is the better it is and this is where we enter bankroll management territory.

Regardless of whether the variance is high or low, the overall results will even up in time, on a large sample-size. Over smaller sample-sizes, variance tends to be high and this is the key to sports betting bankroll management right here. Even though results do even out over the long-run, sports bettors must have small short-term variance, for the simple reason that their bankrolls are finite. If you have large short-term variance, you're highly likely to wreck your bankroll before you can achieve the larger sample-size over which your results even out. You simply won't be around long enough to see your edges yield any sort of results for you.

In sports betting, the edges tend to be extremely small, which means one really does have to place a huge number of bets to see his edges prevail over the variance (which by the way is much higher in sports betting than it is in betting the stock market for instance).

The reason why most sharps recommend that you only bet around 3-5% of your bankroll on a given game (regardless of how strong you feel about it) is that they know you have to squeeze as many individual bets into your bankroll as possible in order to tame the variance.

The bottom line is that regardless of how capable you are of diminishing the effects of variance, you have to be prepared to deal with it if you intend to make money betting on sports. It may be evil, but it's a necessary evil indeed.
Take your sports betting online, where you will enjoy various bonuses and poker rake rebate-like loyalty deals that will further chip away at the variance and the juice. If you turn around enough money, you may even end up in a setup similar to a poker prop. What's a poker prop? A poker prop is a player who gets outlandish rewards in exchange for the time (and money) he spends at the site