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Hedging Your Bets: Top-Notch Risk Management Strategy

If you are hoping to make money from betting - and why else would you be doing it - then you will need to have a decent strategy for dealing with risk and, in particular, keeping it to a bare minimum. Keeping risk low while still trying to win big is the whole name of the betting game, and it is something that you might find you need to work on for a long time before you can get it down pat. But it is going to be a lot easier if you allow yourself the chance to work on a strategy and learn as much as you can about it first and foremost, and that is what we are going to look at in this article. In particular, we will look at a strategy for risk management known as hedging your bets.



Source - CCO Licence


If you have never heard of this before, it’s actually quite straightforward to understand, even if it takes a while to understand how to make use of it as well as possible. Hedging your bets means that you place a second bet on the same market as your original bet, but on a different result. However you do it, you will always either end up with less of a loss, or you might even manage to do it so that you make a guaranteed profit either way. This is clearly a very helpful thing to be able to do if you do a lot of betting.


So how does the process of hedging your bets really work? The method is actually a fairly simple one, though it is important to bear in mind that it will vary depending on the sport and the kind of market that you are placing your bets on. But in general terms, you need to follow hedging when you find yourself faced with one of the following three common scenarios.


  1. When you can lock in additional profit from an existing bet.
  2. When you have changed your mind about a bet.
  3. When you have made a mistake about a bet.

In any of these cases, you can help to mitigate losses or, in some cases, improve and extend your profits, by simply ensuring that you place a similar bet on the opposite result to the one you placed. Not that it is always opposite. In the case of horse racing, it might be that you want to place a bet on the second favourtie as well as the favourite. In a two-player sports event, it might be even simpler, and you can bet on each team, trying to find odds which are as similar to each other as possible. But however you do it, the goal should always be to ensure that you are keeping loss to a minimum.



Source - CCO Licence


When you are in the position of being able to hedge a bet in order to make a guaranteed profit, that is where things can get very interesting indeed, and it is where you are likely to want to focus on what you can do in order to make as much money as possible. If you are clever about it, and if you have lucked into a situation where you can see how two odds for opposite results are producing a conducive situation in which you win no matter the result, then you will want to make sure that you make the most of that. Placing as much as you can sensibly afford will therefore be a good option in this case of guaranteed profit - as long as you have ensured that it is really guaranteed, of course.


 


But even in the case of simply trying to minimize losses, this is a great idea, and it is something that you might want to start practising as soon as possible in order to get ahead. The more that you hedge your bets, and the more you understand how to do it well, the more likely you are to keep your bankroll healthy. This is the kind of risk management that everyone needs to pay attention to, as it is often the difference between ongoing success and repeated failure in sports betting.


Hedging & Betting In Sports Betting


You might be wondering how all this relates to sports betting. As it happens, many sporting events are a fantastic opportunity to be able to hedge your bets, and often offer you a chance to be able to make a guaranteed profit with hedging. You might have a tennis match, for instance, in which Federer is on 2.30 and Djokovic is on 1.50. You can see how to calculate odds in this guide, if you need help on that. That is a prime example of where you might be able to hedge in such a way that you can ensure you make a profit - a little more for one than the other, of course, but a guaranteed profit nonetheless. That is the kind of situation you really want to make the most of, whenever you possibly can. As you can see, sports betting is a great opportunity for hedging your bets, and it’s always a safer option anyway when you are betting on anything.


Losses Mitigation


The main idea of hedging, however, is that you are trying to keep your losses to a minimum. If you focus on trying to achieve that, you will be able to do whatever is necessary to make it happen, and you might be surprised at how easy that can be. Simply bet on the opposite outcome to insure your initial bet, so that you can at least reduce your losses, even if you can’t negate them entirely. This is a useful thing to have in your pocket, and something that you should bear in mind at all times.


As you can see, there are many ways in which hedging your bets is really going to be useful, and if nothing else it allows you the chance to be able to keep your losses to a minimum. This is a sensible approach to sports betting which you will absolutely want to make good use of.

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