How to Track Your Bets – Why You Need to Track Your Sports Bets

We have already covered what a bankroll is and why it is important to have one. However, a bankroll is useless to you if you aren’t tracking your bets. Bet tracking is the difference between keeping sports betting and personal life separate or having to dip into personal funds to stay in the game.

Do I Need to Track My Bets?

It is so important to track your bets! How else are you going to know how much money you have made or lost? Without this information, you cannot answer so many of the questions a sharp sports bettor would be asking themselves all the time:

• How profitable am I?
• Is the strategy I am using working?
• What are my strong points?
• What are my weak points?

Let’s break down how tracking your bets can answer some of these questions.

Am I a Profitable Bettor? Is My Strategy Working?

This one is pretty obvious. Keeping track of how much money you are gaining or losing on each and every bet is going to show you exactly how much money you are making or losing. 

If you see you are profitable, then whatever you are doing is working! If you see you are not profitable, then you likely need to re-evaluate your strategies.

Always take into consideration the length of time you have been tracking your bets, though. If you are in the red after six months, you should re-evaluate your strategy. If you are in the red after a few days of tracking, that may be too small a sample size to draw any conclusions.

What Are My Strong Points? What Are My Weak Points?

Let’s say, for example, that you are dead-even fifty-fifty on your bets. Upon broad inspection, you don’t know anything based on this data! However, when you dig deeper into the data, you notice that you won significantly more on bets that involved basketball. 

This is an important bit of information for you to have! You now know that your basketball bets have a higher win percentage than ANY other bets you are placing.

You can also use your data to find the inverse of your best bets; the worst bets. Perhaps you are incredible at betting on basketball, but less so when it comes to hockey because you are only winning 20% of those bets.

ALL of this information can be used to IMPROVE your betting, but you only get the information if you are tracking your bets.

What Can I Do If My Betting Strategy Isn’t Working?

First, make sure you are USING a betting strategy or model. If you have no idea what I am talking about when I say that, go read our betting models article. Then, come back and read on!

Your model may not be fit for you or you may not be using it correctly. Take some time to further research the betting model you are using. Do you need to increase or decrease your units? Is your bankroll not suited for this strategy? How long have you been losing money?

These are all questions you need to ask yourself.

What Can I Use To Track My Bets?

There is a wide variety of options available to you to track your bets. Some bettors prefer to use Excel or Google Sheets and build out their own formula. 

Others prefer to do it the old-fashioned pen-and-paper way. Others will use various smartphone apps to track their bets.

Personally, I like to use the OddsJam Bet Tracker! When you manually add the information, it is all kept neat, and organized. Along with this, it will generate charts and graphs for you segmented into profit/loss per week, by sport, by sportsbook and more!

When you add bet information directly from an OddsJam Betting Tools page you unlock even MORE features! The bet will grade automatically, meaning you no longer have to manually check which of your bets were won or lost and put it in your tracker. 

Along with this, it will automatically grade the Closing Line Value (CLV) for you! Now you can know how well your bet is aging in real-time — no extra effort is required on your part.

No matter how you decide to track your bets, it is so important that you do! Make sure your bets are informed by your own data and trends, otherwise, you can find yourself in a deep hole.

Whether it’s with the OddsJam Bet Tracker or on your own, track those bets and get out there to make some money!

Check out also, what is a void bet!