Betting “Points”, Staking Plans and why it REALLY matters

Becoming a successful punter requires a pretty wide range of skills – you need to work hard (certainly harder than the bookies) and have the ability to focus and prioritise. You need self-belief when results (which you cannot control) inevitably hit barren runs occasionally, and you need the core maths and probability skills to allow you to interpret the data you get.

Perhaps more important than any of those skills however, is the need for discipline to ensure you always follow a well thought-out and consistently implemented staking plan. It’s absolutely imperative, and we hope that this article serves to both educate about the theory of forming a staking plan, as well as giving an insight into some of the thinking which goes into why we tip some bets as stronger bets than others.

What exactly is a Betting Point?

We advise all our bets on a 1-10pt scale – most bets will typically be recommended at between 0.5pts and 2pts – a sliding measure of how large, relative to our other selections, we believe the bet should be. A stronger bet proposition may result in a larger recommended stakes, scaling to 3, 5 or sometimes even 10 points. A 10 point bet is the strongest bet we would advise.

If you are the sort of person who likes to have the odd tenner here and there, but might stretch to £100 once or a twice a year when you are on a “really good thing”, you should be clipping along at £10 per point. Keep to that, and you should track our PL record broadly (assuming you follow all the tips of course). If you like to take a bit more risk, you might be staking £20 per point, or of course, you might be much more risk averse, and prefer to stake 50p a point. It matters not, because the idea of the points is to ensure our advice can be followed on a relative scale regardless of your appetite for risk or betting bank size.

What types of staking plans are there?

There are a number of different schools of thought when it comes to applying a staking plan. Let’s start with the simplest to start with, and consider why it isn’t a particularly clever way to bet.

Level Stakes

You’ll often hear the term “betting to level stakes”. This means placing a equal sized bets on every selection you choose. It’s a perfectly good way to bet if you’re always betting on the same types of outcomes at the same types of prices, but add a bit more variance into your betting behaviour and it quickly falls-down. It may also be appropriate to smaller stakes if you’re a once or twice a week punter betting on similar types of things from week to week.

If however, you are looking at a range of markets and opportunities, it’s pretty inefficient. For a start, your long-term profit/loss is going to be disproportionately impacted by the relative success of the longer priced selections. Hit a couple of winners at 66/1, and it’s going to dwarf the performance of your bets at more modest prices for example. Inversely, your bank roll could quickly dwindle if you don’t hit that golf winner at 33/1 for a sustained period, despite there being nothing wrong with your assessment of that players chances. Long win-less runs inevitably occur when betting at those sorts of odds.

It’s also going to rate amazing value bets exactly the same as modest value bets.

For example, you see England offered at 10/1 to beat San Marino. Under the level stakes plan you’re going to be putting the same stake down on that incredible opportunity as you would on a more reasonable 10/1 offered about Leicester winning at Everton. That’s clearly not what you should be doing and albeit an extreme example, demonstrates why it’s not the optimum plan. Clearly a bigger bet on England would be appropriate.

Progressive (Martingale)

You’ll see a fair few cowboys out there who swear by Martingale. This is the system that “clever dicks” might explain allows them to regularly beat the house. The system essentially relies on progressively increasing stakes until a winner is hit, on the basis that when that winner finally does come, it pays out a greater profit than the previous bets have lost.

All fine and dandy in principal, as long as you make a couple of key assumptions, and are able to live and breathe them throughout the equation.

Assumption 1: Your betting bank is unlimited – this is to say, no matter how long your losing run might go on, you will always have enough funds for the next bet. Assuming your first bet was “1 unit”, that means you need a bank of 16000 units just to reach the 15th bet. Oh, and the actual number you need for the theory to finish is known as “infinity”. Of course, if you’ve got a bank of the sort of size needed, why do you need to win “1 unit” anyway? Go out and get that McLaren today.

Assumption 2: There are no betting limits – in practice this is much more likely to become your constraint than the unlimited funds. Under Martingale the bets being placed can escalate extremely rapidly, and you’re almost certain to hit bookmakers limits within a few bets. Particularly if you are betting into the more lucrative derivative markets where limits are lower.

Notwithstanding the two main hugely problematic assumptions, under this system, you are staking completely disproportionate funds onto one bet simply by virtue that an entirely unrelated previous bet was a loser. How does that make any sense?

Let’s put this system in the bin immediately, but hopefully it’s demonstrated enough of the theory of staking plans to add another layer of insight, ensuring the last two minutes haven’t been an entire waste of your life.

Optimum Staking (Kelly)

This is our preferred approach, although it comes with a couple of caveats, and isn’t a system we apply strictly. It’s more a guiding principal.

Kelly seeks to achieve an optimum staking plan by considering the chances of a selection winning and the amount of “value” in that bet (i.e. how incorrect is the price on offer). This assumes you are able to put an entirely accurate and precise “true” value to an outcome, which we know in practice is extremely difficult.

KELLY FORMULA

f = (bp-q)/b

• f * is the fraction of the current bankroll you should stake

• b is the net odds received on the wager ("b to 1"); (or the decimal price - 1)

• p is the probability of winning;

• q is the probability of losing

Similar to the Martingale System, the stake calculation with Kelly’s system tends to encourage over-staking against the betting bank balance, and a common implementation of this will be a half-kelly or quarter-kelly, where the suggested stake is reduced to improve the sustainability of the bank roll. That’s certainly our experience for what it’s worth.

Another weakness is that when you have achieved reasonable success, bookmakers limits can quick throw a spanner in the works. Whilst you might be able to stake the suggested Kelly stake on a good quality football match, the likelihood you can get this sort of wager laid on an ITF tennis match is another matter entirely. Given these markets are where you are likely to find your largest edges, applying the suggested stakes becomes difficult to achieve quickly in many cases.

Our approach

Our approach is to tip on a scale of between 0 and 10 points. We apply a loose Kelly basis, advising larger bets when the value increases, and where the probability increases. We don’t however reference a moving bank-roll. The reason for this is that followers join all the time, managing individual bankrolls. We therefore treat every day as a new day with a static assumed “bet bank”. This makes most sense given users may see some but not all of our tips.

It also ensures that where we have multiple different bets at any point in time (such as a golf tournament or a range of Saturday football matches), we are advising bets on a like for like basis.

Hopefully you’re still with us, and now have an understanding of the importance of sensible staking patterns, a bit of insight into the different approaches you could take, and can see (and hopefully) agree, that a hybrid of these tends to make the most sense in terms of the way we run our service.

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