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 anybody can make this dream a reality.

There are actually two factors to consider to make the most of sports gambling:

Bet Selection – Staking Plan – Bet Selection

The first, Bet Selection, is obvious – we need to back winners at least some of the time. Let’s consider Horse Racing, anecdotally there are several professional punters whom earn a comfortable living from picking horses, however the key word here is professional. Research and analysis of each horse within the 59 racecourses throughout the UK takes a sizeable amount of time and experience. If you want to be successful then it’s really a full time job! For nearly all of us what this means is we have to use the advice of experts to do some of the legwork for us.

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

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

Once we have a betting strategy in place it really is time for you to look at a staking plan. The simplest is Fixed or Level Stakes where we simply bet the same amount, for 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 share of the current betting bank is wagered each time. Therefore even as we win our stakes are larger and conversely the stakes shrink in the event the betting bank decreases.

On the contrary, intuitively we know these staking plans to be overly naive even as we would be putting the exact same sum of cash on a horse with low odds in comparison to a horse with high odds. Once we are looking to maximise our profits we should be putting a larger stake on a low odds bet as the return will be less.

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

Using an quality online football (please click the following post) Kelly Strategy Calculator just feed in the values to get the percentage 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 through the Kelly Strategy. This would result in a slower accumulation of gambling profits but a less hair-raising ride.