ASA’s Words of Wisdom

This has become a very popular article for our clients and will remain a staple on this website. For those of you who have never read it, we strongly suggest you do. For those of you who have already read the article in the past, we suggest you do it again. Here goes:

More often than not, a winning season has as much to do with money management as it does picking winners. You show us a player with 60 percent winners and on the plus side and we’ll show you 10 guys with the same games (60 percent winners) but down money. The reason for this drastic difference is simply one word: DISCIPLINE.

To prevent this from happening, we’d advise a unit system based on your purse. Your starting purse should be the maximum dollar amount you can afford to lose for the season. You must set this amount aside and stick to it. You should never wager an amount that would change your lifestyle, win or lose.

We’ll set up a hypothetical purse of $6,000 for the upcoming season. First of all, do not exceed $600, or 10 percent, of your purse, on the opening weekend. In fact, you should never wager more than 10 percent of your total purse on any given weekend. Second, you must establish a unit or star system for the games you wager on. We will do that for you if you join ASA’s football selection service. This part of handicapping is crucial and could mean the difference between a winning and losing season. Now back to the wagering.

Let’s say for example we have a 3-, 4-, and 5-Star play for you in college football. Your opening purse is $6,000 so you do not want to wager more than $600 for the weekend. We have a total of 12 stars. You will divide the $600 by 12 to get the amount you should wager per star. In this case it comes to $50 per star.

Now let’s say we win our two higher-rated football picks and lose our 3-Star selection. You will win $250 on the 5-Star selection, $200 on the 4-Star, and lose $165 on the 3-Star (10 percent juice figured into the loss). Your profit for the weekend will be $285, which is now added to the $6000 purse. The following weekend you will use the same formula but with a total purse of $6285. This means you will be able to wager $628 for the second weekend (10 percent of total purse).