19. Plateau Staking Plan

You will no doubt be aware that there are many different Staking Plans that can be followed, many of them with fancy names. What you need to know is if any of them are relevant to you placing bets on the outcome of soccer matches.

Most of the Staking Plans you will have heard of will be those designed for "luck-of-the-draw" type betting, such as card games or roulette, where the player is unable to exercise any degree of skill or expertise.

We ourselves have researched all the most well-known Staking Plans and, through the application of how our own in-house software program, have thoroughly reviewed each and every one. This was done by applying them to a whole range of different scenarios that can occur with soccer betting (which is difficult enough to do properly even if you have the right computer "tools", and impossible otherwise, due to the number of permutations involved).

We found that the Staking Plan that will fulfil all the requirements necessary to be called "good" is the one known as the "Plateau Staking Plan". It is nothing we ourselves have invented. It is a method that has been known about for a long time although not used much previously, mainly because of the long-winded manual processing of the mathematics involved. But today we can get computers to do all that for us, so this method should now start to come into its own.

The "Plateau Staking Plan" has the almost distinctly unique advantage that it satisfies all the following essential criteria (which sets it apart and above all the other Staking Plans, with the possible exception of the "Kelly Criterion"):

1. It caters equally well for the individual betting style/approach of both the cautious and the more adventurous gambler.
2. It can ensure that, if you hit a prolonged losing streak, a reasonable amount of funds would remain available in the kitty to make a recovery.
3. You will be able to take advantage of a winning streak to enable greater gains to be made, without putting your original gains at too much risk.
4. It offers ease of use, because it can be reduced to a simple spreadsheet application, and for those more adventurous and adept at complicated interactive spreadsheet construction, it allows them to get very fancy with their "conditional" staking parameters.
5. It can be structured to flag up precisely what the value of the next bet should be, based on your particular starting parameters and the outcome of the previous bets placed.

Note that the basic principle that applies to all Staking Plans must still be applied when using the Plateau Staking Plan: Your Selection System must be a worthwhile one, and if you are using Fixed Odds you must still be able to identify some Value Bets, otherwise your chances of increasing your Base Bank over the course of a season will still be very much hit-and-miss.

In essence, the Plateau Staking Plan works like this:

1. You have to decide how much to lay out on each round of bets; this is a crucial issue, and so too is the correct concept of the Base Bank. You simply set a fixed percentage of your Base Bank to become the Initial Base Stake each week.
2. Week by week you lay out your fixed weekly Initial Base Stake until your bank exceeds the starting amount by a pre-determined minimum amount (the trigger point), and then you increase the next stake by a pre-determined amount (we recommend no more than 20% of your winnings at each additional "plateau", and preferably only 10%). Should your bank fall back to the trigger point, you simply revert to the original level set for the base stake.
3. A fail-safe procedure needs to be built into the Plateau Staking Plan to avoid the problem of over-spend that might otherwise occur in the situation where the base stake exceeds 2.1/2% of the Base Bank and an over-long losing streak is evidenced. There must therefore be an inverse trigger that will come into play should your Base Bank start to suffer too much loss.
4. On the other hand, if the happy situation of a long winning streak is experienced, it is possible to adopt a number of higher plateaus. At each higher plane you could increase the additional "level" you are prepared to stake. Be warned, however, that this can become very tricky to control if you start to hit extended losing streaks. On the other hand, the basic system we have outlined is quite straightforward to operate and, as we made reference to earlier, it can be done with the aid of a spreadsheet.

It is also possible to build in a variation whereby the stake is not calculated as a percentage referenced to the Base Bank but to the Current Bank. This has advantages when you are winning, but (i) it can also cause bigger losses if you hit a prolonged losing streak when you are up on your Base Bank and (ii) you will lose out on the amount you can win if you are down on your Base Bank. To overcome the latter problem, you can always choose to adopt a minimum stake amount expressed as a percentage of your Base Bank.

The fundamental issues you have to deal with when deciding to adopt the Plateau Staking Plan are (i) deciding an appropriate mechanism for determining the "level" of the stake each week and then (ii) sticking to that decision, because sound money management is a critical first step in ensuring your betting success.