Bankroll: the part nobody sells you

A unit is a percentage, not a dollar amount

Every play here is posted in units, never dollars, because your unit isn't mine. Pick a bankroll you can genuinely afford to lose — rent money is not a bankroll — and make one unit 1% of it.

At 1%, a brutal 10-loss streak costs you 10–15% of your roll. At 10% a unit, that same streak ends you. Same picks, same night — the outcome was decided before either bet was placed.

Flat bet. The card already sized it.

A 3u play means I liked it more than a 1u play, and I'm risking 3u of my own money on it. That's already the confidence signal — don't double it because you agree.

The fastest way to turn a winning month into a losing one is one oversized bet on the night you felt certain.

Variance is not a leak

At 58%, losing 4 in a row happens roughly every 30 plays. Losing 6 in a row happens. A losing week happens to every profitable bettor who has ever lived.

The mistake isn't the losing streak — it's what people do during it. Doubling up to "get it back" turns a normal drawdown into a permanent loss.

The losing streak is not the emergency. Your reaction to it is.

Never chase

Tomorrow's card has no memory of tonight. It doesn't owe you anything, and betting bigger to break even is how a $200 loss becomes a $2,000 one.

If you catch yourself sizing up after a loss, you're done for the day. That's not a suggestion.

Reloading — decide the rule now, not later

Rolls get depleted. It happens to everyone, including good bettors. What separates a hobby from a problem is deciding in advance how a reload works.

• A fixed amount, from money already earned, on a fixed schedule
• Only money that was already spare — what you'd spend on a night out and not think about again
• Reset your unit to 1% of the new roll. Smaller roll, smaller unit.
• Never from a credit card, loan, advance or overdraft
• Never money owed to someone else — rent, bills, a person
• Never mid-tilt, and never "just this once" to chase a loss

If a reload ever needs to be borrowed, that isn't a reload. That's the signal to stop entirely.

No edge, no model and no website is worth debt.

Lottos and ladders get their own money

The 1% rule is for straight plays. Long shots do not obey it, and treating them like normal bets is how a good month disappears.

Here's the math nobody posts. A +5000 ticket implies roughly a 2% chance. So the expected experience is missing dozens in a row — 30, 50, 60 straight — and none of that means anything went wrong. That's what a 2% shot feels like from the inside. Size them like your regular plays and you're broke long before the one that hits.

• A separate pot. 5% of your bankroll, or a flat monthly amount you'd otherwise spend on entertainment. Walled off from your straight-play roll.
• Tiny tickets. 0.1u–0.25u each. On a $2,000 roll where 1u = $20, a lotto is $2–$5. Not $20. The price does the work, not the stake.
• Pot empty = done until it refills, on schedule. That's the whole discipline, and it's what makes a dry spell survivable instead of dangerous.
• Never top the lotto pot up from your straight-play roll mid-month
• Never scale up after a hit — one winner doesn't make you good at long shots, it makes you a 2% shot that came in

Why play them at all? They're fun, they're cheap when sized right, and a small allocation costs you almost nothing while you wait. That's the honest case — not that they're profitable. Anyone telling you a lotto strategy prints money is selling you something.

Ladders: how to protect the buy-in on the way up

Step challenges are played as doubling ladders — win, let it ride, win again. Until you pull money out, a ladder is one bet at full risk. Three steps up is not profit; it's an unsettled bet.

So pull money out. Two rules.

1. The moment step 1 cashes, pull your 1u buy-in back out.

Your balance doubled, so take out exactly what you put in and let the winnings ride. From that second on you cannot lose money on this ladder. Worst case is break-even. Cost: exactly one doubling off the top.

2. Then sell 25% at every step.

This is the part worth understanding, because it's the whole game: pulling 25% at each step turns a 2× ladder into a 1.5× ladder that can't lose. Double, take a quarter off, ride the rest — 2 × 0.75 = 1.5. Your live position still compounds, just slower, while locked cash builds underneath it.

Read the last column — that's profit no later loss can touch. Bust on step 6 and you still walk away up 6.59u, with 7.59u having been live for the next double.

Pick your own aggression. The pull percentage is the only dial, and it does exactly one thing:

Leaving at any step is always correct. There is no wasted ladder.

A 3-step run cashed is a 3-step run cashed. The only real mistake is the opposite one — being up 8u and riding it to zero because a bigger number was one win away. That's the sequence that turns these from entertainment into a problem.

Track every bet — yours, not just mine

I post my whole ledger because an unaudited record is worthless. Yours works the same way. Date, play, price, size, result.

Not for me — for you. It's the only way you'll ever know whether you're actually up, and it kills the selective memory that convinces people they're breaking even when they're down 30%.

The honest version

This is entertainment played with an edge, not income. Bet like the money is gone the moment it's placed, because sometimes it is.

If betting stops being fun, or you're thinking about money you don't have — stop. That's a better decision than any pick on this site.