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Bankroll Drawdown

Flat staking at a given unit size. This is how far a normal losing run takes you down — and normal is further than most people plan for.

Bankroll after
Drawdown

Losing streaks are longer than people expect

A bettor hitting 55% — a genuinely strong long-term rate — still has better than a coin-flip chance of dropping ten in a row at some point across a season. Eight and nine-bet losing runs are unremarkable. The question isn't whether one arrives, it's whether your unit size lets you still be betting when it ends.

Why unit size is the whole game

At 2% units a ten-bet losing run costs about 18% of your bankroll — unpleasant, survivable. At 10% units the same run costs about 65%, and now you need to roughly triple what's left just to get back to even. Same handicapping, same losing streak, completely different outcome. Most bettors who go broke were right often enough and simply bet too big.

Sizing to survive

One to three percent per bet is the standard range, and there's nothing clever about it — it's chosen so that a bad month is a dent rather than the end. If you'd rather size to the edge on each individual bet, the Kelly calculator does that, and quarter-Kelly usually lands in this same 1-3% neighbourhood.

We run these numbers on every game on the board, every day — or see all ten calculators on one page.

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