| By :
David Duffield
The problem with level staking is that the importance of the winners you back depends largely on their price. That's because in terms of your overall profitability, the result of shorter-priced horses isn't nearly as significant to your betting bank as that of those horses less fancied in the market. To offset this and to smooth out the inevitable ups and downs of flat betting (which is outlaying the same amount on every bet you make), many professional punters employ a proportionate staking approach. Basically a proportionate plan involves betting to return a certain dollar amount (or percentage of bank) per bet. The effect of a proportionate staking approach is that each winner returns the same amount regardless of the starting price. For example you might bet to return $100 per winner, which means that:
(a) If you're getting odds of $2.50 you outlay $40.
(b) If you're getting odds of $5 you outlay $20.
(c) If you're getting odds of $10 you outlay $10. Or you may bet to return 5% (or 5 units) of your bank, which means on a starting bank of 100 units that:
(d) If you're getting odds of $2.50 you outlay 2 units (or 2% of your bank).
(e) If you're getting odds of $5 you outlay 1 unit (or 1% of your bank).
(f) If you're getting odds of $10 you outlay unit (or % of your bank). Consider the following six bet sequence to demonstrate how different level stakes betting can be from proportionate staking:
Winners at $2.50 and $3.50, losers at $4.00, $5.00, $10 and $10. So in this example we have winners at $2.50 and $3.50 from six bets, which represents a break-even result betting level stakes (six units outlaid and six returned). But if we were betting to return $100 per winner, we would have outlaid the following amounts: $40, 20, 10, 28, 25 and 10. Our two winners returned a total of $200 so after our $133 outlay we have a profit of $67 or basically 50% profit on turnover. While this is a very small sample for the sake of simplicity, you can see that a break-even result at level stakes can actually generate a very good return using proportionate staking. And proportionate staking also makes a lot of sense in that no matter how good your form analysis or ratings are, it's a fact that a much greater percentage of the horses you back under $3 will win compared to those at say $6. While you can beat the market, you can't turn it upside down so it makes sense to outlay more on those horses that have a greater chance of winning.
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