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 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, trusted safe football is obvious – we need to back winners at least several of the time. Let’s consider Horse Racing, anecdotally there are plenty of professional punters that earn an appropriate living from picking horses, though the key word here is professional. Research and analysis of each horse within the 59 racecourses across the UK takes a sizeable amount of time and experience. If you want to become successful then it is a full time job! For nearly all 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 a horse racing tipster the most important factor we need to think about is long term results.

The internet is awash with tipsters who 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 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 final results 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 outcome for a range of tipsters. Consider which tipster gives you gave for money and fits with your own betting profile – can you truly place the 100s of tips each month some tipsters require?

Following tipsters alone just isn’t very 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 very own research. This is the strategy successfully used in greyhound racing by followers of the site. Like with many things; the greater you placed into your system the greater you will get out.

Once we have a betting strategy in place it is period to look at a staking plan. The simplest is Fixed or Level Stakes where we simply bet the exact same amount, as an 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 percentage of the present betting bank is wagered each time. What this means is once 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 amount 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 live in age where this research is at our fingertips. From probability theory we possess the Kelly Strategy where the optimal percentage 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 online Kelly Strategy Calculator just feed within the values to obtain 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 by the Kelly Strategy. This would end in a slower accumulation of gambling profits but a less hair-raising ride.