What is Flat Betting?

Flat betting is a staking method in which you wager the same fixed amount on every bet, regardless of whether you are winning or losing. Always £10 a hand, or £10 a spin. It is the safest approach to Bankroll management because it removes the runaway risk created by progressive systems such as the Martingale. Worked example: you flat bet £10 a hand at blackjack using Basic Strategy, against a house edge of about 0.5%. Over 200 hands your expected loss is 200 × £10 × 0.005 = £10. A Martingale player doubling after every loss might instead stake £10, £20, £40, £80 and beyond, and a single bad run can wipe out the whole bankroll chasing one base-unit profit. Flat betting matters because it makes your results a clean function of the House Edge and your volume, with far gentler swings than any chase-the-loss system. The key caveat is that flat betting does not overcome a negative-EV game; it only slows the rate at which the edge grinds your bankroll down, smoothing Variance rather than reversing it. No staking pattern turns a losing game into a winning one. For a positive-EV edge you would size up, but for casino games flat staking is the disciplined default. See Bankroll, House Edge and Expected Value.