The goal for sports punters is to earn a profit whilst enjoying our favourite sport. The sad truth is that for nearly all gamblers, this really is an elusive dream. However by developing and carefully following a stratagem anyone can make this dream a reality.

There are two things to consider to benefit from sports gambling:

Bet Selection – Staking Plan – Bet Selection

The very first, Bet Selection, is obvious – we need to back winners at least some of the time. Let’s consider Horse Racing, anecdotally there are lots of professional punters that earn a comfortable living from picking horses, though the key word here is professional. Research and analysis of each horse in the 59 racecourses across the UK takes a sizeable quantity of time and experience. If you want to be successful then it’s a full-time job! For a large number of us this means we have to use the advice of experts to do several of the legwork for us.

Horse racing has no end of self-proclaimed “experts” on the net charging up to Ł100 a month. When choosing the horse racing tipster the most significant factor we need to think about is long-term results.

The net is awash with tipsters that have had one good month but then go on to post a loss for the next six – but you will only see this one month on their own home page! Never follow any tips without first checking the tipster’s full result history. Choose a tipster who publishes all their horse racing tips history, ideally where the outcome of the tips are published the next day along with a complete history of all their tips.

Take a look-at a Tipster Proofing site for example Racing-Index who grades the results for a range of tipsters. Consider which tipster gives you gave for money and fits with your own betting profile – can you actually place the 100s of tips each month some tipsters require?

Following tipsters alone just isn’t more likely to earn us riches – the best tipsters are locked out for new members or charge such high rates that any profits are lost immediately. The solution is to create our very own system using tips from expert sources combined with our own research. This really is the strategy successfully employed in greyhound racing by followers of the site. As with most things; the more you put into your system the better you are certain to get out.

Once we have a betting strategy in place it really is time to look at a staking plan. The simplest is Fixed or Level Stakes where we simply bet the exact same amount, by way of example 2% of our initial betting bank, each time on our selected horse, however we would want to increase our wagers as our betting bank grows. This leads to Percentage Staking where a portion of the current betting bank is wagered each time. This means as we win our stakes are larger and conversely the stakes shrink in the event the betting bank decreases.

However, intuitively we know these staking plans to be overly naive once we could be putting the exact same sum of money on a horse with low odds when compared with a horse with high odds. Even as we are looking to maximise our profits we should be putting a bigger stake on a low odds bet as the return will be less.

To locate the optimal staking plan we could take a correspondence course in statistics and dedicate several years into research. Fortunately we live in age where this research is at our fingertips. From probability theory we have the Kelly Strategy where the optimal percentage of our betting bank is calculated from the odds of the bet and our very own estimate of the probability of the horse winning.

Using an fantastic online casino (Going In this article) Kelly Strategy Calculator just feed in the values to get the portion of the betting bank to put on each horse. Now the Kelly Strategy can give us some scary percentage stakes if we have an initial run of high odds horses so we could adapt it to a Half Kelly Staking Plan where we wager half the percentage advised by the Kelly Strategy. This would end in a slower accumulation of gambling profits but a less hair-raising ride.