Staking plans: Successful punters are adaptable and willing to learn

Betting Strategy / Wayne Bailey / 26 August 2008 / 1 Comments

Wayne Bailey looks at Staking Plans and warns against complacency.

If you want to become successful at betting, the fist bitter pill to swallow is that you don't know it all, and never will. You might be good at what you do; you may even churn a decent profit. But once you've decided that you have this game sussed out, it won't be long before you get a good kick in the arse.

I know a few professionals on the Irish circuit, and the most successful of those are not the flashy type you'd expect. In fact, they are humble guys - always willing to learn, change, and adapt if necessary.

In some recent articles, Jack and I tussled about a staking plan, and boy can that guy stir things up! However, that debate got me thinking about staking plans in general, and the dramatic effect they can have on series of bets. Indeed, it reawakened an important part of the game that I've probably ignored a little in recent times.

The most basic type of staking plan is level stakes - putting the same amount of money on each horse. But let's be honest, this type of staking while relatively safe, can be boring if the truth be told. If your basic stake was £10, that's fine if your horse is priced say, [13.0] - but what if the price is [1.2]? Will you get any kick out of winning two quid? Probably not. That of course, is why people up or down their stakes based on price. But haphazard staking poses its own problems and it's easier to lose track of how your betting is going overall.

A few years back, a friend of mine went racing with me, and as he knew nothing about horses, he simply followed my bets. Afterwards, we counted our money; he had made a profit, I hadn't. We had backed the same horses, but I had staked based on prices, while he used level stakes. I got stung when one particularly large bet on a short priced horse went under. A clear example of how stakes can turn a successful series of bets into a loss.

So let's presume you are managing to show a level stakes profit - is there a relatively safe staking plan that can be employed to enhance profits? One of my favourite plans is to use a percentage of the betting pot as the stake. So if your betting pot was £100 and you wanted to use 4% of the pot as the stakes, your first bet would be £4. Let's say that bet won, and your bank stood at £110 - your next stake would be 4% of that figure (£4.40). It's not incredibly adventurous, but if your betting is sound, the bank will grow naturally. If not, your stakes will get smaller and smaller.

Actually finding those winners is a matter for another day, but let's look at a real example from my own betting records:
A few years ago, I checked which tracks proved most successful for short priced NH horses (horses priced [1.5] or less), and they turned out to be Ayr, Huntingdon, Uttoxeter and Wetherby. Since 2003, backing each horse at those tracks at [1.5] or less gave 111 winners from 133 bets and showed a level stakes profit of £159.40 to £10 stakes. Not too shabby.
Up until now, I've been using level stakes for each bet, but had I used a percentage of the bank, things would look a lot different. Assuming I had a betting pot of £100, and risked 10% on each bet, my first stake would be £10. If I'd continued placing 10% of the betting pot on each horse rather than using the £10 level stake, the final profit made would be a much better looking figure: £307.94.

Again, it ties in with my original point of being willing to change things if necessary, and I've adapted my staking plan since my research. Out of laziness, I chose level stakes, and I've missed out on profit because of that. In a strange way, a thank you goes to Jack for re-igniting my interest in staking. Of course, this is just one staking plan of many, but it just goes to show the dramatic effect staking can have on your betting.

I'm not advocating that people use the above bets as a system, it's just for demonstration purposes - however, it emphasises my original point: don't assume you know always know what's best.

Test things out, preferably with pennies or on paper at first. Question yourself. Question your strategies - and just as important, question your staking. A profit is hard enough to achieve in this game - so don't let some of that profit pass you by.

Comments (1)

1. Iain J | 25 June 2011

   Good article but .....

   My experience suggests that deciding on a staking plan by overlaying it onto previous sets of results needs to be done with caution. Punters need to understand that it's very easy to get a an attractive but spurious set of results for a particular set of races .

   So, two suggestions:
   1. Ensure that you test a staking plan against a large number of races. 130 races is not a large enough data set in my opinion. It is very easy in retrospect to filter out a small number of specific race types that deliver good results but that does imply repeatability of such results.
   2. Secondly, I suggest that punters should test a staking plan for robustness - against the same datasets but re-ordered. For example, if you're using a spreadsheet to model a staking plan, try re-ordering the race data on, say, alphabetical basis or race distance basis and see how the staking plan performs then. I hate to be the bearer of bad news but doing this will reveal what I now believe might be a universal truth! The performance of any staking plan is highly sensitive to the sequence of results. If a sequence of results is varied even just slightly it can render an apparently good staking plan as rubbish. this last point has made me use a system where I will not bet if my losing run extends beyond 5 races and I will only start betting again once the losing run has ended.

   Use big data sets. Beware of spurious results. Test for robustness. Start to open your mind to the fact that Level stakes betting might be the best there is!