How we size your wager

Why every bet gets its own number

A bet with a big edge deserves more of your money than a bet with a small one, and flat-staking everything throws that away. Every recommended stake comes from two things: the size of that bet’s edge, and your bankroll.

The maths is the Kelly criterion — the stake that grows a bankroll fastest over the long run given an edge you can measure. The bigger the edge, the more it asks you to bet; as the edge shrinks toward nothing, so does the stake. No forecasting is involved: the edge comes from the fair price already on the card.

We never use full Kelly

Full Kelly is optimal on paper and brutal in practice: it assumes your estimate of the edge is exactly right, and it produces swings most people cannot sit through. Every stake DawBets prints is a fraction of full Kelly, and the Risk Tolerance setting picks which fraction — the picker names it beside each option.

Nothing about a larger fraction makes a bet more likely to win. It only changes how much of your bankroll is riding on the same edge.

Set your bankroll first

1. 1

   Open the setting

   On the web, go to Settings and find My Wager Sizing. On iPhone it is Settings → Wager sizing.

2. 2

   Enter your bankroll

   The money set aside for betting and nothing else — not your savings, not next month’s rent.

3. 3

   Pick a Risk Tolerance

   Medium is the default; leave it there if you are unsure.

4. 4

   Choose a rounding step

   Off (nearest dollar), Nearest $5, Nearest $10 or Nearest $25 — so the app suggests a number you would actually type.

5. 5

   Read the preview

   The sentence underneath turns your settings into a worked example: one price, one edge, and the stake and return they produce.

My Wager Sizing is a Plus feature. Without it every card shows the same flat placeholder stake — a fixed illustration with no relation to that bet, its price or any bankroll. On the web a small padlock sits beside it, and clicking it opens the upgrade prompt. See Plans and what each one includes.

Player props are sized at half

Any market whose name contains the word Player — Player Points, Player Passing Yards — has its stake halved after the Kelly fraction is applied. Prop lines rest on thinner, less-tested benchmarks than a game spread, so the fair price behind them is less certain and results swing harder.

In a parlay, boost or SGP, one prop leg halves the whole ticket — a single leg is enough to sink the bet.

Rounding, and the $1 floor

Rounding happens last, after the Kelly fraction and after the prop halving, so the figure you see sits on the step you chose. It rounds to the nearest step rather than down, so it can round a stake up — pick a step that matches the size you genuinely bet at.

Small stakes are left alone on purpose: snapping a $3 recommendation up to a full $25 step would be a much bigger bet than the maths called for. Below a certain size the stake stays at the nearest dollar, and the Settings preview says so in words.

No recommendation ever goes below $1 — a real stake, not a placeholder. It is what a very small edge on a modest bankroll is worth.

When a card shows no wager at all

Cards badged Fan Bet or Caution Bet — and cards with no badge, meaning we never had a benchmark to price them against — hide the wager row completely. Kelly recommends no stake where the edge is not positive, and printing the $1 floor there would imply we found something we did not. What separates those two cases is in Bet badges explained; to keep them out of the feed entirely, put a floor under it with the Min expected value % inputs in Filters.

What the number does not know

• ●Book limits. It does not know your account has been limited, or that a prediction market has only so much size on the other side.
• ●Correlation. Two bets on the same game are not independent, and sizing each alone overstates how much you can safely have riding on one result.
• ●Whether you can still get the price. A stake is only right for the price on the card.
• ●Bonus and free-bet stakes. Kelly assumes you risk the money you put up.
• ●Your real bankroll, unless you saved it.