Turning Horse Racing Losses Into Profits by Staking

Question: "From 100 bets in horse races I got 22 winners for a 22% strike rate. The average price was $4.00. The total return was 88 units. At level stakes this was a loss of 12 units, that is a loss of 12% on turnover. How do I get back at least $100 over the 100 races using a staking plan which recovers past losses as well?"

Answer: Basically you are are asking for magic to turn an ordinary set of horse racing betting results into a profit.

Sure, it's possible to make a staking plan to make a profit from those 100 results, but that will only be because of the particular order of those winners and losers, and the dividends of each at that point in the sequence. Most likely such a staking plan will not work for the next 100 selections and it's just about a certainty that it won't hold up for the 100 after that, or the 100 after that etc.

Now for some advice that can help you.

1. What are your dividends based on? Are they based on your home state TAB or bookmakers' starting price? If so, then you need to work harder at getting a better price. Explore all options for each bet including Betfair, bookies and best of the three totes. It is possible to substantially increase your returns over a large number of bets compared to betting just home state TAB or bookmaker starting price odds.

2. An excellent way of staking horses is to have more on the horses you think have a better chance of winning and more on the horses where you have a substantial advantage over the market. You need to know why each of your selections is a bet. If so, then try staking them based on your confidence about the winning chances of each selection.

3. Try and eliminate a few losers. Getting rid of just 10 losers from every hundred bets does wonders for your overall results. Review your betting. Try and understand why some of your horses won and why some lost. Develop some strategies to avoid some of those losers you might otherwise bet on in the future. This requires decision making on your part. That is needed if you really want to make money.

4. Even if you use a betting system selection method where you think you don't have to make use of your own judgement your results will be much better if you learn to make decisions that some of the horses are bad bets.

5. In my opinion every betting system ever invented using a fixed set of rules will give you some horses that are simply very bad bets. If you work out how to eliminate those bets by using your own judgement each time then you could be on to a winning betting method.

6. If you are not prepared to make any decisions and just follow a fixed set of selection and betting rules you can have plenty of entertainment, but expect that entertainment to come at a price as you are just about guaranteed to consistently lose money over the long term.