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Staking Plans & Managing Your Funds

If you’re serious about sports betting and enjoy making good money, it’s important to implement a staking plan and manage your betting funds properly, and imperative that you maintain self control to achieve the goal of long term betting success.
Staking Plans & Managing Your Funds

If you’re serious about sports betting and enjoy making good money, it’s important to implement a staking plan and manage your betting funds properly, and imperative that you maintain self control to achieve the goal of long term betting success. This isn’t about trying to get rich quick, or trying to strike it lucky with your weekend accumulator. This article looks into sports trading and money management, and how implementing a successful staking plan on the betting exchanges can lead to long term gains.

Betting Bank

The key to having a staking plan is to create and manage a betting bank. Most punters that are serious about sports trading on betting exchanges use a betting bank. Without one it’s a lot more difficult to keep track of profits and losses. Using one helps bettors to increase and maximise profits, and minimize risk.

For the purposes of this article our betting bank will be £1,000. It’s important to point out here that your betting bank doesn’t need to be very high, just a number you’re comfortable to start out with.

Staking Plan

Some of the most famous staking plans such as the Martingale system are used to recover losses. However any successful punter using the betting exchanges will advise you to avoid these at all costs! The most successful staking plans have a long term approach and are percentage based. This requires the bettor to decide to risk a maximum percentage of their bank as their betting liability, whether they are backing or laying bets. Let’s look at an example back bet and example lay bet below.

The liabilities you should be willing to risk per bet should be between 2-5% of your bank. Once you’ve decided on a percentage, stick with it throughout. For the purpose of this example I’ll use 2%.

Brighton are hosting Ipswich at The Amex Stadium in our example, and let’s say you fancy trading live on Ipswich to win. From your betting bank of £1,000, you back Ipswich for a 2% bank liability. Therefore Ipswich will be backed at 2.82 for £20. If you win, your new bank would be £1,035.30 (after commissions) and your next stake would be 2% of this value. If you lose, your new bank would be £980 and your next stake would again be 2% of this value. This continues as your bank goes up or down.

The same method can be applied to your lay bets. If you decide to cover the draw and want to lay Brighton, you can lay them for a 2% bank liability. Therefore Brighton will be layed at 2.9 for a liability of £20. A win would give a new bank of £1,010.30 (after commissions) and your next stake would be 2% of this value. Again if you lost your new bank would be £980.

Bankroll Management

Along with maintaining your stakes as a percentage of your bank, punters are advised to back bets or lay bets at similar odds. You’re not going to make a lot of headway in sports trading by betting the hot favourites at odds of 1.1 for example! Similarly, you’ve got to hit some luck to win when backing the real outsiders at 3 figure odds! Professional bettors using this type of staking plan tend to stick to odds of around evens; sometimes slightly below, and sometimes slightly over.

If you can pick over 55 winners out of 100 games with odds of just below evens, you’ll be returning a profit. Even if you’re on a bad run and hit a bit of a a cold streak, don’t worry, that happens to every bettor. Don’t get emotional about a loss and as long as you’re consistently winning over 50% of the your bets placed you’ll be well on your way to making profits. Most professional bettors would see a win ratio of 60% or more as a real success, as you’ll be making a great return on investment. If you continue to do this successfully over a number of years, the compound interest will dramatically increase your sports betting bank.

Some bettors like to set targets for themselves and withdraw profits after they reach them. One reachable target using our example would be to turn £1,000 into £2,000. At this point you could allow yourself to withdraw £500 of profit, and then carry on sports trading with a betting bank of £1,500. As you can see, whilst this betting strategy has a structure to it, you can also make it quite flexible to suit your needs.

Finding Better Odds

It’s imperative that you find the best odds available when making your selections. This will mean that you continue to maximise the value of your betting bank, and it will have a big effect on your profits over time. Betting exchanges are a great place to find your selections at better odds. Betting exchanges offer improved prices as it’s the general public that set the odds, not the bookmakers. In addition if you’re not happy with the price on offer, you can set your own odds and wait for someone else to match your bet.