Staking Plans

Staking plans for every situation to maximise your profits and limit your losses.

Simple Staking Plans

In simple terms, this is a method of maximising your chances of a long term profit from gambling.

The easiest course would be to follow a strategy of using level stakes for each bet. For example if the amount you have available is £100 (your betting bank) then you might decide to use 5% of that and so your level stakes for each bet would be £5.

There is a lot to be said for this method as any bigger priced winners will ensure a decent return but is probably best suited to selections for a wide range of prices.

Beware of falling into the trap of creating a plan based purely on a set of results unless the results can be shown to be replicable. This especially applies to a plan produced by a tipster to massage his results.

The 'Gentle Incremental'

Just a staking system I use which I call the 'Gentle Incremental'

The idea is to increase your stakes every day by a small amount

For example say you start with a £1 stake - the next day you raise it by 10p to £1.10 - the next day would be £1.20 and so on.

In this way you even out the ups and downs of your results, eliminating a major loss but at the same time gradually increasing your returns (assuming your selections are profitable in the long term)

Compound Plans

One of the most common types is the bank percentage plan which involves staking a percentage of your betting bank. Say your bank is £100 and your percentage to wager is 5% then your initial stake is £5. If the bet is a losing one your bank is reduced to £95 and your next stake will be 5% of that ie £4.75. A winning 2-1 bet would raise the bank to £110 so your next stake would be £5.50.

Life of course is never as simple as this - for example you may wish to place five bets on an Exchange before leaving for work. After the result of the first race you may not be in a position to place the next bet at 5% of the resulting bank. In this case it would be best to place all bets at the same stake of £5.

The downside of this compound staking plan is that after a losing run, where your bank is reduced to less than the starting level, you will only be staking small amounts when the winners eventually come. If, for example, after 10 successive losing bets your bank has been reduced to £59.87 then your next stake is a mere £2.99.

We can get round this by using the Square Root staking plan which means increasing the stake when above your starting bank but leaving it the same when it dips below the starting amount. The amount to increase it by is the square root of the profit so far. If the starting bank was £100 and now stands at £120 then the square root of £20 is £1.41 so the total stake is £5 + £1.41 = £6.41

A third option is to use set stakes eg £5 until a predetermined bank is achieved eg £200 and then increase the stakes to say £10.

At some point you will want to take some of yourprofits. This can be done each time you reach a set amount which you remove or you can leave some of the profit to gradually increase your betting bank.

Price or Value and how they can influence your stakes

If you have identified a value bet, your stake could be influenced by the confidence you have in the bet. This confidence can be boosted by a number of factors such as; all the conditions of the race favour your selection as well as the stats and perhaps the advice of one or two tipsters.

The price of the selection can also play a part for example if it is a strong short priced favourite then a larger bet could be in order and vice versa.

Maria Staking Plan

Maria Staking Plan For Lays

If price is below 3.5 then use 1% of Betting Bank

If price is below 7.4 then use 0.6% of Betting Bank

If price is below 11.0 then use 0.4% of Betting Bank

Recalculate stakes on a daily basis unless the bank is reduced by 35% or more in which case recalculate the stakes before placing further bets.

Using this plan with the BF Bot Manager, the author turned a £3000 betting bank into £97,000 in 1 year.

Kelly Method

Depends upon an assumed price advantage over a bookmakers price. If you think your horse has an evens chance of winning and a bookmaker is offering 6-4 then theoretically you have a 10% advantage.

In this case you would detemine your stake according to the percentage advantage - in simple terms you may increase a standard stake by £1 for each percentage advantage. In this case if your advantage is 10% then your stake is increased by £10.

Recovery Plans

There are many variations of this system but the main premise is to increase your stakes until you recover past losses.

Some suggest you increase stakes by an amount sufficient to recover a lost stake while others will attempt to recover the stake plus your profit.

The infamous Martingale system falls into this category which requires the punter to double stakes until a win is achieved.

The drawbacks to all these schemes could result in any of the following before the required outcome is achieved:

Stakes become so large that the betting bank is exhausted

Funds are not available to be matched on the betting exchanges

The punter loses his nerve when asked to place large bets to recover past losses

More reasonable variations of this method attempt to recover losses by spreading the recovery amounts over a number of bets

For example halve the loss to be recovered and attempt to retrieve that and if successful do the same with the second half.

Sequence Systems

The Fibonacci staking plan is the most well known and uses a sequence devised by a 13th century mathematician. The following sequence is used 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21 ie the next number in the sequence is the sum of the previous two.

The idea is to use stakes following the sequence irrespective of strike rate or odds. You might try applying the method to past results to see if this method suits your usual betting strategy. Has it improved or reduced your returns?

Dual Banking

The dual banking staking plan attempts to profit from all possible outcomes of an event by splitting all participants into two banks. Having decided on a target return for the event you then dutch the selections in each half to achieve the desired outcome.

For example you may decide to dutch together the first four in the market in one bank and do the same with the outsiders in the 2nd bank.

Each bank operates a recovery plan so that if, say, bank 1 makes a loss then, for the next event, stakes are raised to recover the loss. While the other bank will have made its profit, as backing all selections means that one of the two banks must always win.

However it should be borne in mind that a long losing run on one bank could result in over large stakes to recover the loss. In this case you can swap the banks selections in an attempt to end the losing run.

This is an interesting method of staking but does require careful management.

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