Managing Your Staking
Welcome to the first of our editorials, which are intended to help you get the most from your golf punting (and can be applied to punting in general).
Our mission at Form Golfer is to deliver long term profitability by using data to identify value in golf markets. We distil our analysis into clear recommendations for each tournament, with a recommended staking plan, but how is this applied in practice?
The first consideration is one of affordability. Yes, we are aiming to reliably deliver profit, but we don’t want any of our subscribers to risk more than they can comfortably afford to lose. So the first job is to identify how much money you are willing to put aside. We hope to never reach the point where this fund requires topping up, and ideally will see it grow gradually over time.
Once you have done this, we suggest equating each point staked to a value. This could either be a fixed amount, or a proportion of your total balance (in which case the cash value will fluctuate over time).
As a worked example, let’s say you have set aside £1,000. As a guide, we’d recommend each point to equate to roughly 0.1% of your total funds (so in this case, £1 per point staked). Then if our recommendation was for a 5 point bet, you would stake £5. This approach gives you 1000 points in your bank, which ought to provide the ability to ride out a run of unfavourable results over a number of weeks, since we will typically stake anything between 50 and 100 points on any given tournament.
We transparently report our performance, both in points profit/loss and in % return on investment. If we are 200 points in profit, using the above example, that would mean that our bank had grown from the initial £1,000 to £1,200. An important point to note is how vitally important it is to take the best prices available (taking into account the each way terms on offer). The difference between 10/1 and 11/1 may not seem significant at an individual event, but over a long period of time those differences add up and could turn a potentially profitable level of performance into a losing one. So if you want to maximise your returns in the long run, you will need a good spread of accounts to make use of.
