The concept is beautiful. You take your fancy on an international rugby match over the weekend or a midweek football match or a golf tournament on the other side of the world, your pick comes in and a few days later a cheque drops on the doormat. It is a lovely feeling.

The reality, as we all know, is that while the cheques do come, there are also some dark days. Days when you can write out cheques to every firm after a run of bad results. Days when you have to make the call to the customer service desk at Sporting or IG and pay a margin call on your credit card because a long-term position has taken a turn against you.

Unfortunately, no matter how good a punter you are, no one wins all the time. If you are in sports betting, you need to be in it for the long term. Luck, misfortune or a run of poor judgement can mean losing streaks where you forget what it is like to see your account in credit. But the acid test is how far we are up or down in the long term when the bounce of the ball has evened itself out.

The first suggestion is consider keeping your betting money quite separate from your other finances. The betting firms warn that you should only gamble with money you can afford to lose permanently and it is worth deciding how much that is from the outset. Keeping your betting bank in a different account to your everyday living money is easy to do and avoids confusion and potential embarrassment. It also allows a visible way of watching how we are doing. If spread bets are being settled into a general account the small losers tend to get overlooked and it is too easy to subsidise the betting with money you never intended to gamble with.

The second suggestion - and it should be a rule for the bettors - has to be: keep a record of your bets. It sounds simple, but it needs discipline and a willingness to accept when you have simply got it wrong. Writing up the umpteenth losing bet and totting up the losses can be a painful process and a chore that you want to put off, but the benefits are worth the pain.

Calculating your stakes on how much you might lose may seem very negative, but it is essential. If you have a betting bank of $5,000, you don’t want to blow it in one hit. The best policy is to decide how much you are willing to risk on a single bet. This largely depends on how much risk you are willing to take, but risking a maximum of 5 per cent of your bank on a strong fancy seems a reasonable stake.

For beginners and those with modest stakes, the firms’ limited loss accounts are ideal. The concept is that it introduces a limit to how much clients can lose because if a bet is going against them and reaches a certain point, it is automatically closed with what is technically called a stop-loss.

A last thought on managing betting money. Plenty of options are available when it comes to backing on an event, whether it is fixed-odds, on the spreads, pools, one-to-one exchanges, Asian handicap betting or any others. Do not be blind to what is available.  In many cases, spread betting also offers good value. But there are times when other mediums will offer better opportunities, either because the odds are more favourable or because the risk of a spread bet does not warrant the return.

Professional gamblers rarely limit themselves to one form of betting. They make sure that they have the accounts open to be able to bet where they find the best value.