Maybe one of the Staking Plan advocates would like to post a mathematical proof of how a staking plan can increase your profit on turnover because I have never seen one. All the staking plans I have analysed do NOT increase POT in the LONG RUN - they generally do one of two things:

1. Increase POT in short term by "hiding" losses. The old "doubling" plan for roulette is a classic example of this - in the short term your POT is increased because as long as you don't have 10 losses in a row you will make a profit - the problem is when you do get those 10 losses in a row it wipes out all your profits. Most of the staking plans that have no loss limiting built in fall into this category.

2. Increase dollar profits by increasing the bet size until winner is found or loss limit is reached (the 1,3,6,18 plan mentioned by Equine Investor some time ago is an example of this). These do not increase your profit on turnover but create the illusion of higher profits by increasing your average bet size and turnover.

The mistake most people make is to compare what their profit would have been with level stakes betting with 1 unit bets with what they get off a staking plan that STARTS with 1 unit bets. In reality what you should be comparing is the POT figure or what the profit would be with level stakes bets equal to the average staking plan bet. Also you must consider the conseqences of a worst case scenario - eg. 20 straight losses - what would that mean to your staking plan compared to level stakes.

I am not opposed to varying the bet amount depending on the value or winning likelyhood of each bet (eg. if 4 out of 6 criteria met bet 1 unit, 5 out of 6 bet 2 units or 6 out of 6 bet 4 units, etc) - these can make sense and can increase your POT - what doesn't make sense is increasing your bet because the last one lost.

[ This Message was edited by: becareful on 2002-06-26 10:32 ]