Units

A unit is a standardised bet size used to measure and communicate betting performance without revealing exact stake amounts. Rather than reporting wins and losses in currency, bettors and tipsters express results in units, where one unit is typically 1–2% of the total bankroll. This makes performance comparable across people with very different bankrolls and keeps the focus on the quality of selections rather than the size of the wallet. Worked example: a tipster reports '+12.3 units over 100 bets'. If your unit is £100, replicating that record would have profited £1,230; if a wealthier follower's unit is £1,000, the same record yields £12,300 — identical skill, scaled to bankroll. Units also encode staking discipline: a confident pick might be staked at 2 units and a marginal one at 0.5 units, so the unit count reflects not just hit rate but how stakes were allocated. A bettor up 20 units at £100 a unit has made £2,000 over the period. Why it matters: units let you judge whether a tipster or your own system is genuinely profitable, independent of stake inflation, and they enforce a consistent percentage-of-bankroll discipline that protects against ruin. The common mistake is quietly increasing unit size to chase losses, which breaks the whole point of the measure — a flat unit only protects you if it stays flat. Equally, judging a record on units alone without the average odds taken is misleading, because the same unit profit at short odds requires a far higher strike rate than at long odds. Compare with the stake, the bankroll, the win rate and the Kelly criterion, and only ever stake what you can afford to lose.