Whilst there are plenty of different staking strategies that will probably adapt to your betting styles and goals, there are some pointers and examples that can help you chisel a staking strategy to your personal choices. Its best to of course use a successful strategy that has a history of success and then adapt that for your style so here are some types of strategies we would like to recommend.
Fixed Amount Strategy
Fixed Amount or Level Stakes is your basic starter strategy plan which should typically be quite easy for newcomers to use, however it is quite popular and gives you a solid foundation that can lead you to success. It’s quick to calculate what you’re betting on, coverage from losses and it’s easy for you to follow it because it is so simple.
With the Fixed Amount Strategy, you decide based on your bankroll a fixed amount for each bet. The amount should be realistic and allow you to make multiple bets without running out of cash so if you have a bankroll of £1000, you shouldn’t have a fixed amount strategy of £500 as you’ll only be able to place two bets!
Instead, you should look for an agreeable sum between 2% to 5%, this is enough risk to make a profit but also enough to be covering you from any tilts and fatal losses that can happen when betting.
So if your bankroll is £1000, you should be looking at placing bets of £20 to £50 on each bet. You can scale that bet depending on your appetite for risk, so if you’re quite an aggressive bettor you could go with £50 but if you’re conservative we recommend staying at £20. By only using 2% to 5% of your bankroll you’d need at least 20 losses to completely wipe out, that gives you a lot of betting options and room for error.
Of course, there are downsides to this strategy. We recommend it for every beginner but as you get more experienced its common that this strategy won’t satisfy your taste buds! It can be very bland with low profit and because you’re sticking to a quite low % of your bankroll, for the experienced bettors it’ll get old fast as you’ll have to win a lot to build up, for example, a 100% return.
Fixed Percentage Strategy
Fixed Percentage Strategy is a runner-up in popularity, it’s still a simple process but you’ll have to be a little more involved with the maths on this one. Still, you’ll get all the perks of Fixed Amount but you’ll be trying to get more profit out of each bet. This can help you build up returns much faster in the long-term and keep you excited and motivated to bet.
At face-value, the Fixed Percentage Strategy works very similarly to the Fixed Amount Strategy. If we take the example above, we’ll be using 2% – 5% of our bankroll, however, the difference is that for each bet, we’ll be recalculating our % depending on the level of opportunity the bet offers.
So if we decide to bet 5% of our £1000 bankroll, we’ll bet £50. If we win on 5.00 odds you’ll now have a £1200 bankroll, we then recalculate that 5% which would then be £60.
As you win this amount will increase as your bankroll increases meaning you will make better profits but still keeping to a structured and responsible strategy that gives you room for losses.
This is similar to Compound Interest as you’ll be reinvesting your profits and taking a fixed percentage to stake with, ultimately snowballing your bankroll in the long-term.
You’ll also be scaling your risk to your bankroll which covers you from any fatal losses, for example, if you were on a losing streak and went to £800 bankroll, 5% of £800 would be £40. That means you’ll be betting with £40 instead of £50 and protecting yourself.
The disadvantage of this is that you’ll also find that it will be harder to recover your losses, especially if you go on a losing streak.
Martingale Staking Strategy
The final staking strategy we’ll mention that we’ve used at N1T is the Martingale Staking strategy. This is definitely a more high-risk strategy and so it wouldn’t be for every person’s risk appetite, we only recommend this for experienced sports bettors who are fine with losing money in order to make bigger wins. You’ll probably need a larger betting bank as well, so we wouldn’t recommend this until you’ve made enough money from the first two strategies in this article.
The Martingale staking strategy works like this, each bet is at odds of 1/1. If you win, profits are made of course, however, if you lose your strategy is to find another bet but instead double your stake from the previous bet. You’ll repeat this system on every loss until you find a winner.
The strategy is betting on that you’ll eventually hit a winning bet, so if you lost a few bets you could recover from all those losses in one win as well as make some profit.
While its a simple strategy it is a risky one. You’ll need a huge bankroll as you’ll basically be waiting until you get that win, in a way it is either you run out of money or you win and get all your losses back first. Eventually one of those two options will happen, so yes, you’ll need to have a big enough bankroll so that you can survive a few losses as well as low enough stakes to give you room for the double-ups on every loss.
Example of the Martingale Strategy
Let’s say we place a bet for £10 and we lose. That means on our next bet we’ll place a bet for £20. If that loses then we’ll place a bet for £40 and so on. On our £40 bet, we win and so the return would be £80. That gives us all of our original losses back as well as £10 on top.
As you can see this is quite a dangerous and scary strategy for beginners, you’ll need to be used to big losses and have nerves of steel because you might go on 5 times losing streak which would mean on the above example you’d be betting £160 and if you lose that bet you’ll be betting £320.
This can be a fatal strategy so only do this if you’re experienced enough.
Summary
With any bet never risk more than you can afford to lose. Take all bets seriously and stick to the plan. Betting can be an emotional rollercoaster so you’ll need a strategy to protect yourself and keep your decisions logical. As we said at the beginning of this article, you can adapt these strategies to your personal preferences, choose a strategy you understand and like, adapt it to you and most importantly stick to it!
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