The 1–2% rule: session win/loss limits that actually protect your bankroll

Sizing your total bankroll correctly is only half the job — the other half is deciding, before you place a single bet, exactly how much of it you're willing to risk in a single session and exactly when you'll walk away. That's what the 1–2% rule and session limits are actually for.

Unit sizing: the 1–2% rule

The core rule is simple: size each individual bet at roughly 1–2% of your total bankroll, not a fixed dollar amount you picked because it felt right. Conservative players stay at the low end of that range; more aggressive players stretch toward 5% on their highest-conviction sessions, but rarely beyond it.

The math behind this is about survivability, not optimization. Small unit sizes mean a losing streak — which will happen, on any game with a house edge — shrinks your bankroll gradually instead of ending your session (or your week) in a handful of bad rolls.

Setting a loss limit before you start

A loss limit is a number you decide before you play, not one you feel your way toward mid-session. A common structure is capping session losses at around 20–50% of that day's allocated bankroll — never your entire bankroll, and never an amount you'll try to "make back" by increasing bet size.

The entire point of deciding this number in advance is that you're not the same decision-maker twenty minutes into a losing streak that you were before you started. A pre-committed number doesn't care how you feel.

Setting a win limit (yes, really)

Win limits get ignored far more often than loss limits, which is backwards. A reasonable structure is a session win target of around 20% of your bankroll — at which point you stop, not because you're being superstitious about a "hot streak," but because giving back your gains chasing a bigger number is one of the most common ways a green session turns red.

The stop-loss protects your bankroll. The stop-win protects the session you already won. Most players only think about the first one.

Why most people ignore both

Both limits are easy to write down and hard to follow, because following them requires stopping while you still feel like continuing — either because you're down and want to recover, or up and want more. That gap between "the rule" and "what you feel like doing in the moment" is exactly what turns into tilt, which does more damage to a bankroll than the house edge itself ever will.

This is precisely why DiceRoller's model doesn't leave the stop decision to how you feel in the moment — the daily window and risk settings are fixed in advance, the same way your loss and win limits should be. Full details on how that window works are covered in sizing your bankroll before you touch the dice.