Staking Plan

Poor staking is the main reason people lose money when betting. Casual Punters may have £10 or £20 on a 2-1 (3.0) shot and hope to win money but if you bet at these prices regularly, can you afford to make the same bet 10 or 20 times over if you lose? You will certainly need to be able to do so backing at these kind of odds as losing streaks of 10 or more are inevitable.

There are many different ways of going about your staking but quite simply each bet should be a sensible proportion of your betting funds that keep the risk of losing all your money low. As long as you set out like this and you are able to find value, you should have no problems making a profit.

A good rule of thumb is to times the average odds you bet at by 10 to work out what your worst losing streak is likely to be. You then may decide to make your bets small enough to cover this losing streak 2 or 3 times. If this sounds too complicated then making each bet 2% or 5% of your total funds is often a safe way to go.

Whether or not you decide that you want to vary your stake size is up to you but I can advise that for the most part you’ll find it difficult to beat level stakes. Levels stakes is betting the same amount on every bet and as well as often being the most effective, it also creates less headaches and keeps your focus on finding value without worrying too much about just how much values each bet has.

This is not to say that you can’t vary your stakes and some people prefer to have a 3 star system or even something more complicated like the Kelly formula where they can bet more based on the type of odds or how much value they believe a bet has. What tends to happen though is that people get over confident in selections or prices that they shouldn’t be betting more on and they end up making less money than they would have done with level stakes.

My advice is to start with level stakes and test other potential staking methods out on paper before committing your hard earned cash.