A successful bettor has to possess a perfect mix of experience, knowledge and, most importantly, discipline. Most of us know several people who are brilliant punters but end up losing heavy- and all of their stories come down to a lack of discipline and proper money management.

The fact that a serious bettor has to be disciplined at all times is a rather obvious one. When saying ‘serious bettor’ we are talking about a punter who’s betting results have a large influence on his overall income. This means that an Eastern European who stakes 50 EUR per bet and earns 500 EUR during his everyday job is considered a serious bettor(as his monthly profit/loss can easily go up to 100% or more of his salary), while a multi-millionaire who places 1000 EUR per bet definitely isn’t a serious bettor. If you are serious, you obviously cannot afford to lose a large portion of your betting bank on a single match, and punters who place large amounts on one bet in order to cover their losses obviously get shot down in the end – their betting bank is a serious bettor’s working tool, and if you lose the most of it, you are left without the tool to do your job with. If you are not able to restrain yourself from placing hasty enormous-staked bets, we kindly advise you to search for a new source of income, as betting is not for you.

If you are sure that you can keep yourself calm and disciplined at all times and are planning the right strategy for the start of your serious betting, the next thing you should be doing is to figure out which money management suits you best. There are three types of money management strategies that are widely used: typical progressive systems, the 1-10 unit system(which is often based on the Kelly criterion) and the flat staking system. We will give you our thoughts on each of these systems.

Progressive systems are a definite no-go. From the infamous Martingale to the system which sees you raising every bet by one unit when you lose and doing the opposite when you win, all of these systems have one thing in common: they are designed in order to recoup losses, and allow you to win more than you deserve. Martingale, in particular, produces devastating results on the long run – this system requires you to double up your every bet after every loss, and a mere 0-7 run would see you needing to stake 128 times what you staked on your initial bet. The supporters of this system, of course, will argue that such a run occurring is highly unlikely, but it does come – sooner or later, and once it does, you will find yourselves biting your nails three hours before the kick-off of your next bet and getting premature gray hair. While Martingale is an extreme example, the basic problem with the progressive systems is that all of them decrease the mathematical expectancy of you winning on the long run, while a losing run will almost always leave your bank in a devastated condition.

The 1-10 unit system can be fine if properly used, which is rarely the case. Many of those who use this system do the terribly wrong thing of wagering 10 units only on bets which they believe have an extremely high probability of winning. As there is a close correlation between the odds offered on an event and the realistic chances of a certain outcome, finding a 2.05 odds bet with a winning probability of 70% is highly unlikely, which effectively means that such punters, who wager their biggest bets on the ones they are most sure about, either have a very poor perception of probabilities of match outcomes, or place their maximum bets only on bets with odds 1.4-1.5, which are the kind of odds rarely taken by quality punters. What was written above had the goal of pointing out why this way of staking is ridiculous, but the main problem with it is that it by no means increases your chances of winning on the long run, and definitely certainly should not be used. The other, way more acceptable version of the 1-10 units staking, is the one based on probabilities: the more advantage you have over the bookie on a particular bet, the more you should stake. This kind of strategy has been subject of heated debates in the worlds of economy and betting alike – whether or not it actually produces better results than flat betting is therefore very much debatable, but it’s a system that has a lot of common sense in it and should not be overlooked. However, there are two problems with this system: the first one is the punters’ ability to objectively determine the value present in a single bet. Making a long term profit and a yield of 107-108% is hard enough itself, while making a difference between the value of 7% and 14% is extremely difficult. Without any doubt, all punters make errors in estimations on countless occasions, and staking 10 units on a bet which you believe has 15% value in it but actually has only 5% will leave you badly bruised on the long run, especially as you will also definitely ending up taking some brilliant bets with two or three units. The second problem is of psychological nature. High-staked bets(9, 10 units, etc) leave the bettor under serious pressure – two consecutive 10 units bets that end up losing will can be a real mental hammer blow, while, as we explained in our previous article, one of the key thing in the business is to remain cool and confident at all times. To sum it up, this way of staking is recommended only for punters who can accurately determine the value(in ROI) present in their bets but also have a lot of patience and are not easily discouraged by losing runs – every punter who doesn’t fit into both of these criteria should consider another way of staking.

Finally, the flat staking… Plain and simple. As you can deduce from looking at our stats, we at secrebettingtips are huge fans of this system, and prefer to focus on increasing our winning percentage in every possible manner instead of trying to modify our staking in order to win more than we deserve during short periods of time. The flat staking system has no major advantages over any other system, apart from not suffering from the problems other systems suffer from. The goal is for every bet placed to have the same level of risk as the others, and the profit or loss you make by this system will be determined purely by your betting skills – winning 6 out of 10 bets with odds around 2.00 will leave you in profit, while, ie. the 1-10 staking plan can leave you in minus after such a run, given that, for example, you win 6 five unit bets and lose four 10 unit ones. Of course, unit based staking could also leave you in profit after winning only 3 bets out of 10, but our stance(as stated in our previous articles) is that they key thing in betting is to keep the frustration levels down to a minimum, and we therefore whole-heartedly embrace this system, as it will never leave you being angry at yourself for wagering too much/too little money on a certain bet.

While we don’t suggest that the staking plan we use is the only right one, we urge everyone not to use progressive systems as they simply don’t work, while everyone contemplating a unit-based system should ask themselves if they can overcome the problems aforementioned in this article. Whichever system you opt to use, the general consensus in the betting community is that the maximum size of your bet should by no means be bigger than 2.5%-3% of your overall betting bank, while the size of bets/units should be altered according to the changes in bank size(increasing/decreasing the stake after the bank increases/decreases by 20-25%).