Progressive Interval Betting Strategies

There are different types of betting strategies out there, and most of them aren’t very good or effective. However, the progressive interval strategies that we’re going to outline here are very much a viable option to try to get more out of your sessions if you have a particular play style.


An Introduction to Progressive Intervals

When post people choose a betting strategy, they do so based on some semblance of what’s typically considered good bankroll management. They want to pick a bet size that fits their goals while simultaneously being responsible with their money.

This is very much a good thing, but there are different approaches and ways to go about it that aren’t always the most popular thing.

In what follows, we’re going to break down the differences between linear and progressive betting intervals and give players some ideas on how they can change up their betting styles to go after slightly different goals than what all of the traditional bankroll management advice tends to give.

While we aren’t suggesting that this will be a good fit for every player every single time, the fact of the matter is that it’s good to have an open mind about other betting strategies than the one you use so that you can better understand the basis behind the way you choose to play.

Understanding the Progression of Linear Casino Betting Systems

Linear casino betting systems start off by following a series of steps. These steps are the same no matter what you’re playing, what your bankroll is like or what your predisposition is toward risk:

  1. Evaluate the volatility of the game you’re playing (high, medium or low).
  2. Evaluate how often you intend on depositing and what type of bonuses and promotions you’ll be using.
  3. Consider how much you’re be playing during a given period of time.
  4. Decide on the number of bets that you’ll need in your overall bankroll based on the results of steps 1-3.
  5. Divide your bankroll by the number found in step 4 to find the average size of bet that you should be using.

For example, you may decide that you need to have 500 betting units based on your own game selection and situation, and with a 250 bankroll, you could decide that this means you’ll use a bet size of 0.50.

This is all very logical in the general sense, but it does have some downsides in that it doesn’t take into account how to increase or decrease your bet sizing during a session or after a series of sessions based on how much you win or lose. As a result, this is not a complete betting system in the big picture sense, and that can leave players to fill in the gaps on their own.

Introducing Progressive Intervals

Instead of basing your bankroll management and casino betting strategy off of the number of bets in your bankroll, another option is to base it around the number of sessions that you have to play. For example, instead of dividing your balance by the number of wagers you can place, you can divide it by the number of sessions that you could go with a full losing effort before going broke.

For players who want a quick and easy bankroll management option, this is an easier system to use in terms of estimation as well, and that works better for many compared to breaking out a calculator.

For example, if you have a bankroll of 500, and you want to make sure that you have enough to bust out of sessions 50 times, then you’ll use an amount of 10 as a stop loss for each individual session. However, what you’ll notice is that it doesn’t tell you how to wager with this amount during the session itself, and that’s where we jump back over to bet-based systems with a bit of a twist.

The Anatomy of a Session

Before we get into how the progression of bet sizes works within the context of a session with this type of betting system, we need to first take a brief look at what a session actually means here.

For our purposes here, a session is when you play until one of two results happen:

  1. You bust and stop playing for the time being.
  2. You stop before going bust.

For the times that you stop before going bust, there are two further ways things can end:

  1. You can stop because you are tired of playing or have something else to do.
  2. You can stop because you’ve broken your “stop-win” amount.

The amount of money that you have set aside for each individual session is your stop-loss in this approach, but you also have a stop-win, and we’ll talk about how to set that down below when we look at defining your intervals.

Defining Your Intervals and Resulting Bet Sizes

Suppose that you start a session with 25 in whatever currency you’re using. Looking at how you feel, the game you’re playing and so on, you’ll decide on a bet size to use when you’re between 0 and twice your starting amount, which in this case is 50. This is your base interval, and it follows this idea:

The bet size that you choose to go with initially will be the bet size that you use as long as your total balance for the session stays inside of the base interval.

So here’s a point to consider. If you start with a session balance of 25, for example, and decide to use a bet size of 1 unit, then what should your bet size look like if you run that amount up to more than 50? With an interval-based casino betting strategy, you would double the size of your bet accordingly, and this creates the second interval that runs from 50 to 100.

With that, we end up with the following understanding of our first two intervals:

  • From 0 to twice our starting balance value creates the first interval, and when we’re inside of that interval, we keep the same starting bet size (0 to 50 from a 25 starting balance in our example).
  • When our session balance is more than twice the starting value, that starts the beginning of our second interval, and we will double our bet size accordingly.

However, we’ll also have third, fourth and fifth intervals, and we’re going to keep those as the same size as the first. If we’re under a balance of 50, then that’s the first interval. If we’re from 50 to 100, that’s the second interval. The third will be 100 to 150, the fourth will be 150 to 200 and so on.

Before we get started, we’re going to decide on a stop-win amount that’s based on these intervals. If we decide to play with four intervals, then we’ll have a stop-win of 200, for example. A five-interval strategy would use a stop-win of 250 and so on.

Bet Progression Options

From here, we have to decide how we want to handle betting within each individual interval. While it’s obvious that you always use your starting bet size if you’re still within the base interval, there are multiple options when it comes to how to handle betting when your session balance breaks into the second, third and further intervals.

The two most common options are as follows:

  • Linear Progression – You increase your bet size according to multiples of the starting size. For a starting bet of 5, for example, you’d use 5 in the base interval, 10 in the second, 15 in the third and so on.
  • Doubling Progression – You increase your bet size by doubling the size of the bet used in the previous interval. With a bet size of 5 to start with, you would increase to 10 in the second interval, 20 in the third, 40 in the fourth and so on.

The doubling progression is used the most often by people who really want to try to get the most out of their winning streaks, and the linear progression is typically used when you want some excitement without things getting too out of hand on long winning streaks. In any event, you’ll still observe your stop-win measure once you get to that point.

Overview

There are pros and cons to every casino betting strategy, and some can be used in some games while others can be used in others. The idea behind a progressive strategy like this one that’s based on intervals is to treat play based on sessions instead of individual wagers since that’s how most people think about their play to begin with. In any event, it’s another option to add to your repertoire when you may think it’s appropriate.