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A. When
talking about staking plans, I am referring to those that
require you to change the size of your bet
(up or down) based on the result of your previous bet.
This concept in itself has no logic.
The chance of your current selection winning has nothing to
do with the result of your last selection so why should that
influence the size of your bet?
Take an example where you might have two bets for a day. The
first one being a horse you thought had a good chance and
the last one being a horse you assessed as an outstanding
chance, a real special. Lets see how different staking plan
concepts might see your betting action pan out.
Staking plan
1: Increase your bets after a loser and decrease or
maintain them
after a winner: This is perhaps the most common type of
staking plan, used to quickly recoup previous losses.
Under this plan,
if your first bet wins, you are now going to
put less on your next bet. But why? Your next bet is an
outstanding chance, even better than the first. If you can
get a fair price you should be having more on this horse
(relative to your first bet),
certainly not less.
Staking plan
2: Decrease your bets after a loser and increase them
after a winner:
If
your first selection wins, that's great, you are going to
have more on your special in the next race. But what if your
first bet lost? You are now required to have less on your
special. This is hardly what I would call a
common sense betting strategy.
There are lots of plans out there that promise to turn
losses into profits and make more money from a given set of
selections. The problem is however that these claims are
based on a past set of results from which the plan was
formulated. When you know the pattern that winners fall in
it's easy to create a plan that has the bigger bets
placed on the winners and the smaller bets on
the losers (for that set of results). If you have ever
looked at these plans, don't you find it amazing how a large
bet happens to come up just as the double figure winner is
found?
Of
course the pattern of future winners is unpredictable and
most likely will never mirror your past pattern. The
effectiveness of the plan therefore comes down to pure luck
on how closely your winners represent the historical pattern
the plan was formulated from.
The other problem with staking plans is that most fail to
adequately protect your bankroll from going bust. In an
attempt to recover previous losses many plans require your
bet size to keep going up, far beyond safe levels. An
extended run of losers, which even the very best punters
have sends your bankroll bust very quickly.
Chasing losses, no matter what the plan, is the fastest and
surest way to go broke betting on the races.
Whichever way you look at it, the concept of staking plans
that require you to alter the size of your next bet based on the result of
your previous bet just doesn't make sense. Your bets should
be influenced by the chance your horse has in the upcoming
race, not by the result of a previous unrelated event.
The better
chance your selection has, the more you should put on it, up to a fixed
amount that is safe relative to
your comfort level and secondly to your punting bankroll.
A
common professional method of betting is to bet to win a
fixed % of your bank based on either your assessed price or
the price you obtain for each horse, providing you think
it's a fair price (otherwise don't bet). This means that the
better the chance your bet has (according to your
assessment) the more you place on the horse. This is a much
more effective way of betting and the approach I follow
personally.
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