Once you have a system in place for highlighting value bets in football matches, you are still left with the question as to how much money you should bet on these matches.
Having a good staking plan is crucial to maximising your profits and limiting your losses and for each betting system you are following, you should make sure you think carefully about what the best staking plan is for you.
Listed below are some brief details on some of the most common staking plans.
1. Level stakes
This plan simply involves betting the same amount on every bet, whatever the odds, and however much profit or loss you have made with previous bets.
There are no strict rules as to how you should come up with your fixed stake, but a typical amount might be 5% of your original betting bank. So, if you are starting with a betting bank of £200, your fixed stake would be £10.
This plan is the simplest to follow and easiest to implement.
2. Percentage plan
This plan involves setting your stake as a percentage of your ongoing betting bank.
So, if you start with a betting bank of £500 and decide to always bet 5% of your bank, your initial stake will be £25. If your first bet wins at odds of evens, leaving you with a bank of £525, then your next stake will be £26.25. However, if your first bet loses then your next stake will be £23.75.
This increases your profits during winning runs, with greater stakes meaning more profit, and, with reduced stakes during losing runs, it would take a lot of losing bets to wipe out your betting bank.
3. Fixed profit
The previous two plans don't take into account the odds of individual bets and in both cases you would be risking the same stake on a 1/4 shot as you would on a 20/1 shot.
This plan does take into account the odds and calculates your stake based on a fixed amount that you are aiming to win with each bet.
So, if you have set this at £10 and your next bet is at odds of 4/5, then your stake will be £12.50. If the odds are 3/1, then your stake will be £3.33.
4. Fixed percentage profit
This plan is basically a combination of the previous two and involves you setting each stake to try to win an amount that is a percentage of your ongoing betting bank.
So, if you have a betting bank of £400 and your fixed percentage profit target is 5%, then you will be aiming to win £20. Therefore, if your next bet is at odds of 4/6, your stake will be £30.00, while if the odds are 7/2, then your stake will be £5.71.
5. Martingale
This is a system that is often talked about in casino betting, and involves repeatedly increasing your stakes until you get a winning bet.
So, let's say you start with a bank of £100 and bet just £2 at odds of evens. If you win, then you are £2 in profit. If you lose, however, then you bet again, setting the stake so that you recover your previous stake and acheive a profit. If this bet also loses, then you repeat the process, again increasing the stake, until you get a winning bet and acheive a profit.
In theory, this plan should always produce a profit as a winner will eventually come. However, this is only true if you have an unlimited betting bank, and it doesn't take many losing bets before you are risking very large stakes to win a relatively small amount of money.
For this reason, we recommend that this system is never used.
What is the best staking plan?
There are many more staking plans than those listed above, and staking plans can always be adapted further (e.g. increasing your stake when a bet offers more value) so that you can come up with your own custom one. Unfortunately, however, there is no correct answer as to which staking plan is best for any given system.
Even if two people were following the same system with the same initial betting bank, this doesn't mean that both should be using the same staking plan. For example, one person might choose to play safe and aim for a fairly small profit in the knowledge that their betting bank is unlikely to be hit too hard, while the other person might be looking for huge profits and might be happy to risk wiping out his or her betting bank to do this.
The best approach to finding a good staking plan for a particular betting system is to apply different staking plans to historical data for that betting system. Whether it was downloaded from www.football-data.co.uk, or collected by you when researching your system, you should have a good amount of data available before you start following it with real bets.
If this data is in Microsoft Excel (or a similar software package), then entering a straightforward formula will enable you to see how much you would have won by betting a fixed amount on each match. A slightly more complex formula will let you see how much you would have won by betting a fixed percentage of your ongoing bank, while a more complex formula still will let you see how much you would have won by betting on each match so as to aim for a profit equal to a percentage of your ongoing bank.
Once you've applied various staking plans to your data, you can easily see which staking plan would have given you the highest profit had you been betting for real on these matches. However, just to confuse things further, this doesn't necessarily mean that this is the staking plan you should use for this system.
You should look closely at your ongoing bank for each system to decide which one is best for you. For example, you might find that the staking plan that showed the highest profit went very close to wiping out your betting bank at one point after a bad run of losing bets, while another staking plan shows a profit almost as good as this, but has a much steadier increase and at no time comes close to wiping out your bank. In other words, would you rather take a safe escalator up to the third floor, or a dangerous rollercoaster up to the fourth?
