What a Unit Actually Means

A unit is one standard bet, expressed as a percentage of a bankroll rather than a dollar amount. Reporting in units lets a record mean the same thing to someone staking twenty dollars and someone staking two thousand. It also stops a record being inflated by quietly betting more on the plays that happened to win.

The definition

One unit is one standard-sized bet. It is not a dollar figure. If your bankroll is two thousand dollars and you have decided a unit is one percent, your unit is twenty dollars. A result of plus ten units means you are up two hundred dollars. The same plus ten units means plus five hundred to someone with a five thousand dollar bankroll on the same one percent sizing. The record is identical; the money is not.

How a unit should be sized

The common guidance is one to three percent of a bankroll per bet, and the lower end of that range is where most people belong. At one percent, a ten-bet losing streak costs you ten percent of your roll and you carry on. At five percent, the same streak costs you half of it and the decisions you make after that are made under pressure, which is when people chase. Flat staking at a small percentage is unglamorous and it is what keeps bettors in the game long enough for an edge, if they have one, to show up.

Why we do not vary stake size by confidence

Graded records that use five-unit plays and one-unit plays invite a specific abuse: the big numbers attach themselves to the winners in the retelling. More importantly, confidence is poorly calibrated in most bettors, including professional ones. Flat staking removes the question entirely and makes the record mean one thing. If you want to size by edge, the Kelly criterion is the formal answer, and the honest version of it stakes far less than most people expect.

Converting our record into your money

Take the unit figure on the record page, multiply by whatever one unit is worth to you, and that is the result you would have had if you had taken every pick at the published number with flat stakes. The last clause does most of the work. Taking some picks and not others produces a different result, usually a worse one, because the picks people skip are not randomly chosen.

Why the exact -110 figure matters

A winning bet at -110 returns 0.909090 units, not 0.91. Rounding up adds a tenth of a unit for every hundred wins, which is small enough to ignore on a single bet and large enough to notice on a record. We use the exact figure. If our unit total disagrees by a tenth with a calculator that rounds, that is the reason.

Common Questions

How much is one unit in dollars?

Whatever you decide it is, and the decision should be made once, in advance, as a percentage of your bankroll. One to two percent suits most people. The number should not change because you feel strongly about a game.

Why not just report profit in dollars?

Because it would be meaningless to anyone whose bankroll differs from ours, and because dollar figures invite the sort of screenshot that advertises a good week and omits the month around it.

What is a good unit return over a season?

Sustained positive units at -110 is difficult and most bettors do not achieve it. Be sceptical of any figure presented as routine. A modest positive return over a large sample is a far stronger claim than a large one over a small sample.

Should I increase my unit size after a winning run?

Only if your bankroll has grown and you are recalculating the same percentage of a larger number. Raising the percentage because you feel hot is the most reliable way to give back a winning run.

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