Units

A unit is a measuring stick, not a sum of money. Instead of saying “I bet €50 on Villarreal to win,” a bettor working in units says “I bet 2 units,” where a unit is a fixed percentage of their total bankroll — commonly 1%, sometimes 0.5% or 2% depending on how aggressive they want to be. The bankroll might be €3,000 today and €3,600 after a good month; the unit resizes with it automatically, but the relationship between the stake and the bankroll stays constant.

The reason this matters is that raw euro figures tell you almost nothing when you’re comparing bets, tipsters or your own history. A €200 stake means one thing to someone with a €500 bankroll and something entirely different to someone with a €50,000 bankroll. Units strip that ambiguity out. When a tipster posts “+14.2u for the month,” that figure is comparable across every follower regardless of how much they’re staking, and it’s comparable across the tipster’s own history regardless of how their bankroll has grown or shrunk since they started.

Units also do the quiet job of enforcing discipline. Once you’ve decided a standard bet is 1 unit and a strong-conviction bet is 2 units, you’ve pre-committed to a ceiling. That stops the two most common bankroll mistakes: chasing a loss with a stake three times your normal size, and gradually creeping your “standard” bet upward after a winning run without ever deciding to. The unit system forces every staking decision to be made in advance, in cold blood, rather than in the moment.

Example

Say a bettor sets their bankroll at €1,800 and defines 1 unit as 1% of that, so 1u = €18. They run a simple three-tier system: 1u for straightforward bets, 1.5u when they have a stronger read, 2u for their highest-conviction plays, and they never go above that.

• Bet 1: Villarreal to beat Getafe at 1.85. Standard conviction, so they stake 1u = €18. It wins. Profit: €18 × 0.85 = €15.30.
• Bet 2: Jannik Sinner to win a hard-court quarter-final at 1.65, where they think the market has underrated his matchup. Higher conviction, 1.5u = €27. It wins. Profit: €27 × 0.65 = €17.55.
• Bet 3: An each-way outsider in a 16-runner handicap at Longchamp, odds 12.00 to win. Speculative, back down to 1u = €18. It loses. Loss: €18.

Net across the three bets: +€15.30 + €17.55 − €18 = +€14.85, or expressed in units: +0.85u + 0.975u − 1u = +0.825u.

Two months later, after a good run, the bankroll has grown to €2,400. The bettor recalculates: 1 unit is now €24, not €18. Every future stake resizes to the new bankroll, but the historical record stays in units, so last month’s “+9.4u” and this month’s “+6.1u” are still directly comparable even though the euro value behind each unit has changed.

Key Points

• Fix your unit size before you fix your opinion on a bet: decide 1% (or whatever fraction suits your risk appetite) of bankroll as a baseline before you start picking matches, not after you’ve already got excited about one. Deciding it mid-bet is how a 1u plan turns into a 4u plan.
• Recalculate on a schedule, not after every bet: recompute your unit value monthly or after a defined number of bets, not every single time your balance moves by €10. Recalculating too often makes winning streaks compound your stakes dangerously and losing streaks shrink them into irrelevance.
• Keep the tiering system small: three tiers (say 1u, 1.5u, 2u) is plenty. Bettors who invent a 1u–10u sliding scale for “how sure” they feel are usually just rationalising a gut-driven stake size after the fact, which defeats the entire point of using units.
• Use units to judge a tipster’s actual record, not their win rate: a tipster hitting 55% of bets at short odds can still be bleeding units, while one hitting 40% at longer decimal prices can be well in profit. Ask for the units record, not the strike rate, before following anyone’s advice.
• Never let “unit” quietly mean two different things: if you occasionally stake in flat euros for a “fun” bet outside your normal record, don’t fold that figure back into your units log — it corrupts the very comparability the system exists to protect.
• A unit is about consistency, not accuracy: it won’t make a bad bet good or a good bet bad. Its entire value is in preventing stake size from being driven by emotion, streaks, or a sudden urge to get even after a bad week.