Most Horseracing websites that offer tips or insights usually give profit figures that are set to a level stake plan such as £1.00 level stakes or 1 point level stakes where 1 point equals your set stake like £1.00, £2.00, £5.00 etc. Unless you have a high strike rate with reasonable odds then this is usually unprofitable. Backing favourites is a classic example of this where in UK racing the strikerate of winning favourites hovers around the 32% mark when you couple this with favourite odds that can be as low as 1.10 then you need a very high strike rate indeed. To illustrate this figures taken from Adrian Massey’s website that has logged the fate of favourites from the last 16 years, list that of all the favourites that had an S.P. (Starting Price) of odds below 1.5 or 1/2 over the last 16 years of which there were 6868 only 74% of them won which gave a win return of 97% in other words for each 100 bets of £1.00 you would net £97.00. over the 6868 bets then you would lose £206.04 if you placed a £1.00 win on each race.
Baring this in mind we can approach the problem from a different angle, we can adjust our stakes to achieve a net profit of a specific amount such as £1.00.
To do this we need a target figure and for this example I will use £5.00. To calculate the stake needed you divide the target (t) by the decimal odds(do)-1
Stake = t/(do-1)
So if the odds are 2.5 decimal (6/4 in fractional odds) then our stake to achieve a £5.00 net profit would be : 5/(2.5-1) which is £3.33
When we use this in a real life scenario the results can be quite surprising.
The table above shows the tipster from The Times Newspapers’ NAPs for September 2025 and clearly shows the advantage of using a “Back to Target” staking plan as opposed to a “Level Stake” staking plan. The figures used are from Betfair historical data using BSP (Betfair Starting Price) instead of the ISP (Industry Starting Price) as a consistent base starting price and a 2% commission rate on winning bets
Using a “Back to Target” plan and a target of £5.00 the profit over the month comes out at £7.33 while using £5.00 level stakes the loss is £19.54.
His strike rate is 26% for this month which is no great shakes when you consider that he is a National Newspapers main Horseracing tipster and these are supposed to be his best bet of the day but this is a clear illustration that fortunes are not to be made following tipsters but a profit can be.
Betornot 