Fixed stakes

If you’re new to sports betting, it’s easy to reduce your risks by staking the same amount of money on each bet.

You’ll be protecting yourself from any errors of judgement due to the euphoria that overcomes you after a series of winning forecasts. You’ll also be significantly reducing the risk of losing everything.

You’ll reduce this risk still further if your stake only represents a small fraction of your betting portfolio. Our advice is to choose a fixed sum which represents between 1% and 5% of the total amount that you’ve allocated to sports betting. A higher amount could expose you to too great a risk.

Fixed stake systems are very simple, but they do not allow you to act on your instincts for each forecast. Neither do they take account of changes in the size of your sports betting portfolio.

Proportional stakes

Opting for a proportional stake (%) of the total amount of your portfolio allows you to overcome both of the disadvantages of the fixed stake system. Betting a certain percentage of your sports betting portfolio allows you to:

• Change the amount of money that you stake in proportion to the size of the portfolio.
• Modify your stakes within a particular range to take account of your “hunches”.

We recommend that for each bet, you should stake between 1% and 5% of the total amount of money in your betting portfolio.

In conclusion

The main advantage to both of these basic systems is that they are easy to use. Their main drawback is that they don’t take account of the risks inherent to each bet. As you know, you don’t have the same chances of winning your bet at odds of 1.2 and 10. The probability of the predicted event actually happening should be considered when you’re choosing the size of your stake.

The Kelly Criterion is a better system to use if you want to adapt the size of your stake to the quality of your forecasts and the odds at which you’re betting.

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