Before "Do betting strategies work?" gets an answer, the budget comes first. Every betting strategy rests on two questions: what to bet on, and how much to put on each pick. The second one decides more than most people expect. A sound bankroll and a fixed staking plan keep a bad week from ending the whole budget, while a loose one turns ordinary losing runs into real damage. What follows covers the staking side, where a plan can actually be built.
A betting strategy built on martingale doubles the stake after every loss, so that one win recovers everything lost plus the first stake. On paper the plan cannot fail; in practice a run of six or seven losses, which comes sooner than people think, asks for a stake sixty or a hundred times the first one. Table limits or the bankroll end the sequence long before the promised win comes.
Do betting strategies work, then? Staking plans control risk and cannot remove the margin built into every price. The best betting strategies, including the best betting strategy for football or any other sport, come down to picking where the bettor has real knowledge and staking with steady discipline. To create a betting strategy is to write those two parts down: a market to study and a staking rule to follow.
Bankroll management units turn that share into a number. One unit is usually one or two percent of the bankroll, and every stake is counted in units: a normal pick gets one, a strong opinion perhaps two, and never ten. Counting in units makes results comparable across weeks and bet sizes, and it shows at a glance when stakes have started to drift upward after a winning or losing run.
No. Chasing a loss with a larger stake breaks the staking plan and turns an ordinary losing run into serious damage to the bankroll.
On a fixed day chosen in advance, never straight after a bad result, when a loss would push the decision toward bigger or riskier stakes.
Yes. A record of every bet, winners and losers alike, shows what the staking plan actually returns and whether stakes have drifted from the units set.
Full Kelly trusts the bettor's own probability estimate completely, and estimates tend to be too kind, so half or a quarter of the formula keeps stakes from growing too large.