Staking Plans to Build Your Bank

Introduction

Professional gamblers adopt a carefully considered staking strategy in order to achieve long term growth of their betting bank. Some staking strategies are very simply whilst others can be very complex involving mathematical formulas to determine exactly how much to stake.

In summary your staking plan is trying to achieve an acceptable balance between risk and reward. Risk being defined as the possibility of losing your entire betting bank, and reward being the growth of your betting bank. There are many well known staking plans and you will find that many professional gamblers will have a custom staking plan based on one of these, which they have then fine tuned over the years for their own, exact requirements.

Mainstream Staking Plans

Some of the more well known staking plans are:
Level Stakes Betting | Percentage Bank Staking | Kelly Staking | Martingale System

We will shortly be taking a detailed look at each of these different staking strategies. For the time being though we have provided a summary of the basics below.

Level Stakes Betting

The idea with level stakes betting is that you bet the same amount on all selections, regardless of the odds and current size of your bank. This is one of the simplest staking strategies and also one of the lowest risk staking strategies around.

Percentage Bank Staking

In contrast to level stakes betting, with percentage bank betting you adjust the size of your bets to reflect the current size of your bank. Each bet should represent a fixed percentage of you bank, for example, you may decide you will always bet 2% of your bank. After a loss the next bet will be smaller, after a win the next bet will be bigger. The basic idea is that in bad runs your stakes get smaller and smaller to ensure you don't burn your whole bank. In contrast, when you are on a hot streak, your bets would become bigger and bigger to accelerate the growth of your bank. This can appear to be an appealing proposition but in reality there is more to it, rather than runs of losses and runs of wins the 2 are generally mixed together.

Kelly Staking

One of the most complex staking plans, the Kelly Staking strategy requires a mathematical formula to calculate bet sizes. The actual size of the bet is dependent on the edge the gambler has over the bookmaker. One of the complexities involved is being able to accurately work out what your edge is.

Martingale System

The Martingale system is quite straight forward - if you lose a bet, place a larger bet next time to recover your losses and make a profit, if you lose again, increase your bet again. The big floor here is that bet sizes can increase very quickly and you can soon encounter either of 2 problems. The first is that the required bet size could be well over the size of your bank. The second is that the required bet, even if you can fund it, may exceed the maximum stake size allowed by the bookmaker.

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