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

There are two things to consider to profit 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 numerous professional punters who are earning an appropriate living from picking horses, but the key word here is professional. Research and analysis of each horse in the 59 racecourses throughout the UK takes a sizeable quantity of time and experience. If you want to become successful then it’s really a full time job! For a large number of us it indicates 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” over the internet charging up to Ł100 every month. When choosing a horse racing tipster visit the next website most significant factor we need to consider is long-term results.

The net 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 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 such as Racing-Index who grades the final results for a number of tipsters. Consider which tipster provides you with gave for money and fits with your own betting profile – can you really 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 own system using tips from expert sources combined with our very own research. This really is the strategy successfully employed in greyhound racing by followers of the site. Like with many things; the greater you placed into your system the better you can get out.

Once we have a betting strategy in place it’s period to look at a staking plan. The simplest is Fixed or Level Stakes where we simply bet the exact 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. This implies since we win our stakes are larger and conversely the stakes shrink when the betting bank decreases.

On the flip side, intuitively we know these staking plans to be overly naive once we will be putting the same amount on a horse with low odds in comparison to a horse with high odds. Since 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 seek out the optimal staking plan we can take a correspondence course in statistics and dedicate several years into research. Fortunately we are living in age where this research will be 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 very own estimate of the probability of the horse winning.

Using an online Kelly Strategy Calculator just feed within the values to obtain the number 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 lead to a slower accumulation of gambling profits but a less hair-raising ride.