Time Management Hacks For Gambling

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BetMGM Dec 04, 2023, 6:54 AM

Time is money, as Benjamin Franklin famously once said. There’s no doubt that effective time management is key to success in just about every activity, whether it’s business, sport, engineering, or even working out. When it comes to playing online casino games, there’s a significant correlation between time management, bankroll management, and gambling responsibly. Spoiler alert: it’s all about imposing the right gambling time limits. Keep reading for time management tips that really work when you play casino games online.

Adopt a Winning Mindset

Of all the online gambling tips and tricks, the most important is to manage your online gambling time effectively. The first step toward achieving this goal is to cultivate the right attitude.

In recreational gambling, a winning mindset is one that prevents you from losing money. In other words, you’re gambling for the right reasons. For you, gambling is purely a form of entertainment rather than a means to make money. This means you aren’t going to spend hours chasing losses, which is what gamblers with the wrong attitude find themselves doing all too often.

As a result, you can treat gambling like any other form of entertainment. In the same way that a balanced schedule won’t be occupied by watching TV, playing video games, or working out obsessively, you’ll be able to integrate recreational gambling with all your other activities.

By doing this, you’ll avoid the mistake of accidentally spending too much money on gambling simply because you’ve become too absorbed and lost track of time.

Scheduling Gambling Time

Once you’ve adopted that winning mindset, it’s time to schedule your gambling time. This simply means setting aside a certain amount of time each day or week to spend gambling. There’s no specific rule for determining how long a gambling session should be, although four hours is a reasonable limit. The important thing here is to remain consistent and stick to your schedule. Dedicated sessions allow you to focus without distractions on playing, which will improve your gaming experience while automatically setting limits for gambling because these are the only times you allow yourself to gamble.

Time and Your Bankroll

As mentioned, time and money work hand in hand, so while it’s important to structure your gambling time, it’s equally important to practice good bankroll management. As a first step, it’s a good idea to set a budget with money that you’ve set aside specifically for gambling. This has to be money you can afford to spend, the same as spending money on movie tickets or any other entertainment. The next step is to establish your personal loss limit. Say you’ve scheduled a dedicated three-hour gambling session at the same time every week and you’ve budgeted $400. To avoid spending your entire budget in one session, you’ll want to set a loss limit per session of $100. To avoid spending your $100 session limit too quickly, you’ll want to manage your bankroll so that it stretches to cover the allotted time.

Time and Your Bankroll

It’s impossible to stretch your bankroll without responsible bet sizing. This simply means tailoring your bets to the amount of money you have to play with and the betting range of the game you’re playing. Take online slots, for example. Research indicates that a gambler who plays slots for three hours one evening per week and bets $1 per spin will spend $1,000 per month on average. If your budget is $400, it’s obvious that $1 is too large a bet size for your limits. Instead, you’ll want to bet a maximum of $0.40 per spin.

Investing Your Wins

Gambling is all about variance, with ups and downs an inevitable part of the experience. Many sessions will see you hitting your loss limit, but sometimes you’ll end up ahead. So what do you do with your wins? First, a note of caution. It can be very tempting to chase a winning streak and ignore your self-imposed time limit in order to maximize your profits. Unfortunately, this can put you in a position where you make rash decisions and gamble your wins away. Worse still, you could then try to recoup your wins (after all, you still have your bankroll to play with) and wind up losing. This is called blowing it. A much better use of your wins is to plow them back into your bankroll. With luck, your pastime could end up bankrolling itself.

Set Gambling Goals

Another advantage of structuring your gambling time is that it helps you to set gambling goals. Top online gambling tip: this is only really possible with games where skill is involved. There’s no way to get better at purely chance-based games like slots. But if you play blackjack, for example, you can potentially narrow the house edge down from 2% to 0.5% with a basic blackjack strategy. That would be a worthy goal, allowing you to place larger-size bets with the same bankroll and potentially take advantage of variance when it swings your way.

The same principle applies if you play poker online. Improving your skills naturally tends to reduce losses, enabling you to manage your bankroll more creatively. It also makes gaming more fun. After all, responsible gaming is healthy gaming, in every sense. Ultimately, it’s possible — difficult, but possible — to beat the odds and make consistent profits from poker.

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Our BetMGM editors and authors are casino experts with a wealth of knowledge of the online casino industry at all levels. Their coverage includes company news, game reviews, how-to instructional articles, strategy guides, and editorials showcasing BetMGM’s superior product and game library.

Our BetMGM editors and authors are casino experts with a wealth of knowledge of the online casino industry at all levels. Their coverage includes company news, game reviews, how-to instructional articles, strategy guides, and editorials showcasing BetMGM’s superior product and game library.