The best horseracing betting systems (Part 1)

What are the best ways to successfully stake your bets.

 

All the information in the world can be undermined by poor staking.

And the best golf bets, horseracing gambles, or football tips you can lay your hands on can be wasted by bad investment strategy or an inefficient use of funds.

Conversely…

You can make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, if you employ a prudent and structured way of betting – and then stick to it!

Now the way in which you stake your bets will be determined by many factors – size of your betting bank, the volume of bets, strike rate (volatility) of the information, your general risk profile.

So one single staking plan will not work for every backer, or even for every service/tipster that a punter might follow.

The key is to choose the staking plan which fits you and the information best… then you’re onto a winner!

And in order to assist you in this quest, I have put together a simple guide to the most popular staking methods around. Some good, others bad. Some conservative, others gung-ho.

But each one needs to be taken on its merits, and applied to your own preferences – because what might seem cavalier to you, may appear cautious to another.

This is the only way to give yourself the best possible chance to become what we’re all after… a winning gambler. And you will do just that if you get your content right, and your staking spot-on.

Here’s the dozen leading staking methods, plans and strategies. For each one I’ll provide an overview and some personal comment, based on my near 30 years in the betting business.

Here they are…

So we start at the very beginning with arguably the easiest and most effective strategy of them all…

Level Stake Betting

Definitely the simplest… and arguably the best, or most reliable, yardstick when judging any set of results (and it’s certainly one of my preferred methods).

Level stakes betting is fairly self-explanatory… a method where you put an identical, level stake on every single bet.

Typically “1 point” placed to win, or 0.5 points placed each-way (to make a 1 point total outlay).

Users of this strategy would typically create a starting bank, based on the past performance of the betting service/system they were using, and split this into any number of points – 50, 100, 200.

So regardless of whether the current bank figure was in profit or loss, and whatever the odds of the bet, each investment on this model would be staked to £10 win (or £5 each-way).

Because this staking plan ignores the strength of the advice, and the price of the bets, it gives a very accurate guide as to the quality of the information at hand. And those results which show a loss to level stakes will need very close scrutiny with regards to their overall value. Basically, showing a negative return to level staking is a red flag!

If stuck to rigidly, level stake betting can break a betting account (for example, in the above example, what if you backed 100 straight losers!!). But there are workarounds to this such as a percentage staking plan.

The flipside is that level stake betting takes no account of price.

And because many backers place larger stakes on short-priced bets, and smaller stakes on long-priced bets… using this plan will mean they place larger stakes (proportionately) on bigger priced bets.

This is seen by many observers as the best way to make the biggest profits in betting – placing larger stakes on your bigger priced winners.

Level stakes betting, and studying any service’s long-term LSP (level stakes profit), remains the quickest, and most reliable, method of investigation when studying any new data source or content provider.

It cuts through other elaborate and often unnecessary staking methods, and answers that leading question that we all ask when faced with a supply of unknown information -“is it any good?”

Fixed (Stakes) Betting

This is one of several variations on level stakes betting, and in this staking plan the bet is almost reversed engineered.

In other words, you fit the stake to the odds… in order to create the same return for each bet placed.

So in terms of fixed stakes betting, your stakes will be “fixed” by your target profit for each horse/team/player you’re backing.

Let’s take the notional £1,000 starting bank that has been previously mentioned.

And you choose to win £20 every time you bet (or back a winner, more to the point).

Each time you’re looking to win the same pre-determined cash amount, should the bet win… but your stake changes in line with the price of the bet.

And the calculation is easy enough to make each time… it’s simply the target return (in this case £20) divided by the decimals odds minus 1 (2.0 = Evens, 3.0 = 2/1, 5.0 = 4/1 etc).

So 4/1 equates to 5.0 in decimal terms… minus 1, to equal 4, and £20 divided by 4 makes for a stake of £5.

What this means, in effect, is that you’ll stake more money on the shorter priced bets, less on those at bigger odds. And as bets at smaller odds are statistically more likely to win, this will suit those backers with a more conservative risk profile.

This staking plan certainly makes for a more controlled investment of your money, but it doesn’t suggest that you’d go on to receive a more profitable return in the long-term.

But it does highlight a method of staking which has a direct link to odds, and the probability of a bet winning, which is something that certain backers may prefer.

 

OPINION: Both these staking models are simple to understand, and easy to use. Not the most sophisticated staking systems, but like most things in life… simplest is often best. Next time I’ll turn my attention to several rather more complicated models, known as “compound staking” plans. These include, percentage staking, the Square Root staking plan, and the 1326 staking system – click here to read on