What is flat staking?

What is flat staking?

We talked about bet recording already. Everyone who wants to be serious about betting — actually we all fulfill this requirement, I am sure, but some might still think betting is a game of luck and not one of skill — has to somehow keep track of his bets. Not just being able to make total records and hits expected, hits needed, hits scored, and the turnover that has been made and the percentage and whatever we can and are advised to keep track of (the more, the better, but read the article about it first), but also trying to find out and check the pure quality of our bets. In the future (the nearer, the better…) we will even have some more advanced features to evaluate the „deserved outcome“ and with it the „deserved probability distribution“ of any fixture recorded and compiled, which will give us even better options to do this, but anyone can start right away: try to watch the game yourself, be it just the highlights, read about the games you bet on, prematch and post match, look at the stats that occurred, maybe even look at the „XGoals“ other sides determine and try to approach the outcome a lot fairer than the pure result might tell you.

Anything that you can squeeze out might help you, and this refers to these two characteristics: being objective and become better. Although they obviously and clearly belong together.

Still there is this one part of bet recording that can cause some headache. It is this referred to in this chapter: flat staking. What?

Well, what you would like to find out is how you would perform without the elimination of luck. Sounds a bit funny, because it has been discussed already that especially in football with those very limited number of „countable events“ (goals are rare…) has a pretty high amount of luck involved. But we want to ignore this one part for now, but instead just have a look at the games we bet on and how many we had right.

What many try to advertise is this: „we have a hit rate of more than 80%. So come to us and you will also win.“ What these „institutions“ do not tell us is: what price did you bet on? Or even a bit closer: what is the average price you bet on to make it 80% hit rate? Or, now the pre-ultimate question: what would you have recorded had you placed every bet with the same amount of money?

If the average price is 1.10, then a hit rate of 80% is dismal. You would in 80% of the case „win“ 0.1 units (1.1 the price you bet, 1 unit is your own money of this). Gives you 8 units „win“ in a hundred bets. The other 20 bets you lose. So you make a total „bargain“ of -12 units over 100 bets. Great.

Or we could express it otherwise: if we, the betty team or the author here or actually anyone understanding those basic maths would be asked to get a hit rate of 90% (so a lot better than the 80% promised by these „unwise“ guys doing so), then we could easily arrange matters. We simply bet for prices of 1.05 wherever we find them (or even lower than that). It is easy to get your hit rate almost as high as you would like to have it — it is a totally different story to make it profitable. So these are „false promises“, but obviously people sometimes fall for that (of course you, dear reader, never would, I know…).

The pre-ultimate answer of the recording is this: just record your bets by placing a single unit per bet. This would eliminate for certain the part of luck that could arise with making combination bets. You may place two of them, with let’s say five games each. In the one you hit them all, in the other one you hit none. Your average price in these two bets would be 1.80. So you would make some major win on these two bets, but still have a bad hit rate. Because to make 10 single bets with a price of 1.80 you needed at least to hit 6 of these 10 to be profitable. You would get (if the price were 1.80 each bet, to simplify it) 60.8 units win, so this is 4.8 units, and you would lose the other 4, which is a minus of 4 units. So you would have a (theoretical) net profit of 0.8 units if you hit 6. If you hit only five you lose one unit ( 50.8-5 = -1).

In the combination bet, just to make this apparent, too, you would win one bet with 5 games at a price of 1.80. This gives you a win of.8 to the power of 5 = 18.9, minus your two units you bet on both these bets (you lost the other bet with the other five games), so you still make a profit of 16.9 units if you distribute your hits to the maximum effect. While making them as single bets (this is what is called flat staking) you would still lose one unit.

So to eliminate this part of luck we wich to have a better recording system, and obviously we found one. Flat staking. Record your bets as if you just bet one unit per game. Do not change this amount, just to keep a clean record. Why it is only the pre-ultimate solution? You needed to read the next chapter „What is wrong with flat staking“.