Staking

A very important part of successfully making money from racing is getting your staking strategy right. We have looked into all sorts of strategies that might help us make more profits from our systems by using clever staking methods but in the end the best all round strategy is the simple 1 point per bet method with subtle adjustments for the strength of the prediction.

Points

Using a "points" system instead of a particular monetary value when talking about betting helps to make our results make sense to a wide range of bettors. Quite simply, one point is your standard stake for placing a bet. Even if you vary your stakes, you probably have a sum of money in mind that would be your "standard stake". This might be £5, £10, £100 or any other sum. If your standard stake was, say £100 then a 1 point bet would be £100. A 2 point bet would be £200 and so on. In this way, when we say we have made a "15 point" profit you can easity translate this into what you would have made if you had made bets using your standard stake.

Backing

We have a simple system of using either 0.5 points, 1 point or 2 points for a bet. If you are following our Backing products (either Win only or Place) then you should make your bet as per the stake instruction (0.5, 1 or 2 points). The stake is worked out by using the strength of the prediction - a very strong prediction will suggest a 2 point bet, whereas a weaker prediction might only be a 0.5 point bet.

Laying

There are two main ways of looking at staking for laying. You can either bet to win 1 point (fixed stake) or bet to lose 1 point (variable stake).

A fixed staking method is what we recommend for our Lay products. This means that for each Lay bet we recommend you should lay that horse at 1 point so that if the horse loses the race you win one point, and if the horse wins the race, at say 2/1, you lose 2 points.

A variable staking method is where you aim to lose a maximum of 1 point per bet. This means that for the same example as above, if the horse is at 2/1 when you place the bet you will place a lay bet of 0.5 points on the horse to lose. This means that if the horse wins the race you only lose 1 point. However, of the horse loses the race then you only win 0.5 points. You can see that for longer odds horses your winnings can be quite low (for example, a 5/1 horse would require a bet of 0.2 points therefore limiting your upside to 0.2 points.) The upside of this method is that if you don't trust your system to be statistically profitable it does at least limit your losses a little. However, at Punter's Genie we have a statistically profitable system so this does not apply to us.

Using the fixed staking method for lay betting gives us the best balance of risk versus reward.

Variable staking and chasing winning/losing streaks

You quite often hear of staking strategies that are designed to increase your profits if you are doing well and reduce your risks if you are doing poorly. One of the most famous is the %age of bank staking strategy. On the face of it this looks like a good bet - you increase the size of your stake as your betting bank gets larger and larger (and reduce it as your bank gets smaller if you are losing). Surely, you would think, with a profitable system this would make sense. Well, it does make sense but only in a very specific and narrow set of circumstances - Specifically you would have to see a very, very smooth increase in your bank size over time. We have seen that from September '06 to February '07 we saw an almost constant 80 points per month profit on the Multi-Lay product. However, the day to day "noise" (the ups and downs, wins and losses) has quite an effect on a %age of bank strategy. Even though, at the end of the period you should see a slightly better return on your money, the risk taken on any particular day because of increased bet sizes really puts a strain on your bank - and remember you have to calculate your bet size after every bet to make this work even remotely properly. With 60 bets a day on the Multi-Lay this would be almost impossible!