Percentage Staking Plan

Betting Trends at Wimbledon: Analyzing Top Seed Losses

Before the year 2000 you would have to go back to 1962 to find a player out of the top 5 seeding in the ladies tournament that won. Since and including 2000 there have only been 10 players that were within the top 5 seeding that have won the ladies tournament. Where did these players fall by the wayside and what odds on the exchange could you lay them off at?
2024 saw 31 seed Krejcikova winning the tournament with a 2-1 victory over 7 seed Paolini, but the top 10 seeds started falling out in the 1st round with the dismissal of Zheng and Vondrousova with sportsbook odds of 1.17 and 1.13 respectively. Round 2 saw 5 seed Pegula lose to unseeded Wang, her sportsbook odds were 1.25. The third round was a disaster for the seeded players with 1 seed Swiatek (Odds 1.08), 9 seed Sakkari (Odds 2.2) , and 10 seed Jabeur (Odds 1.5) all crashing out. This left just 4 of the top 10 seeded players progressing into the 4th round which also saw casualties in the form of 2 seed Gauff (Odds 1.29) and 11 seed Collins (Odds 1.44). (I have included Collins at 11 seed because No 3 seed Sabalenka withdrew before round 1 and did not play in the tournament). Both remaining top 10 seeded players, seed 4 Rybakina and seed 7 Paolini made it safely through the quarter finals but the semi finals were the limit for seed 4 Rybakini (Odds 1.2) who lost to eventual winner Krejcikova. As mentioned before Paolini was the last of the top 10 seeds to fall and became tournament runner up with match odds of 2.2.

The implications of these events warrant some serious investigation into either backing the underdog at sportsbook odds if you haven’t got an exchange account or laying the seeded player on the exchanges.

2024 Round 1 Matches

Wimbledon 1st round matches backing the underdog at £1.00 level stakes

The table above shows the results and profit had you backed the underdog with Bet365 sportsbook for a £1.00 level stake. As you can see your profit would have been £1.00

Wimbledon 1st round matches laying the top 10 seeded players.

This second table shows the results and profit achieved when laying the top 10 seeded players for a £1.00 liability at the exchange with a 0% commission If you factor in a 2% commission then the profit would be £3.02 instead of £3.25.

2024 2nd Round Matches

Wimbledon 2nd Round Backing the Underdog at £1.00 Level Stakes

In the 2nd round just 1 seeded player was knocked out and the “underdog” for the match was Wang Xin who was 3/1. Total stakes for round 2 was £8.00 producing, after Wangs’ win, a total loss of £4.00. This brings our total P/L for the tournament if we were backing the opponent of the top 10 seeded players to -£3.00.

Wimbledon 2nd round matches laying the remaining top 10 seeded players for a £1.00 liability

This table above shows the results if we had laid the remaining top 10 seed players. Our loss after 2% commission would be £3.74 giving a total loss of £3.72

2024 3rd Round Matches.

Wimbledon 3rd round matches Backing the underdog for a £1.00 level Stake

2024s’ 3rd round saw 3 of the top ten seeded players get knocked out including No 1 seed Swiatek which produced the highest individual profit of £7.00. The overall profit for round 3 backing the underdogs at Bet365 was £5.30 giving us an overall tournament profit of £2.30.

Wimbledon 3rd round matches laying the remaining top 10 seeded players to £1.00 liability

The dismissal of 3 of the remaining 7 top 10 seeded players has put our P/L back into the black with a 3rd round profit of £5.71 before commission deduction. With this factored in the 3rd round profit is £5.51 giving a tournament profit of £1.79

2024 4th Round Matches

Wimbledon 4th round matches backing the underdog at £1.00 level stakes

The dismissal of both Gauff and Collins in round 4 would have given us a level stake profit of £2.50 backing the underdog at Bet365 the retirement of both Keys and Kalinskaya ensured safe passage to the Quarter Finals of the remaining 2 top ten seeds Paolini and Rybakina. With these two wins in this round our total tournament profit for backing the underdog now stands at £4.80.

Wimbledon 4th round matches laying the remaining 4 top 10 seeds to a liability of £1.00.

Laying players at such short odds at the exchange has paid off in this round giving us an after commission profit of £3.10 adding to our tournament profit giving a total of £4.89

2024 Quarter Finals

Both of the remaining top 10 seeded players made it safely through to the semi finals reducing our Level stake profit when backing the underdog to £2.80. Laying the seeded players also had the same effect on our laying to a liability profit to £2.89 after commission.

2024 Semi Finals

Wimbledon 2024 Semi Final Matches showing the backing of the underdog at £1.00 level stakes

Paolini triumphed in her semi final match against unseeded Vekic but backing Krejcikova to win against Rybakina paid dividends producing an overall semi final profit to £1.00 level stakes at Bet365 of £2.0 giving us an overall tournament profit with just the final to play of £5.30.

Semi final matches involving the remaining 2 top ten seeded players when laying to a £1.00 liability.

Again laying the seeded player instead of backing the underdog produced a greater profit before 25 commission was deducted even with the commission subtracted the profit is £3.28 giving a total tournament profit with just the final to play of £6.17

2024 The Final.

The Final for Wimbledon 2024 where 31 seed Krejcikova beat 7th Seed Paolini 3/6 6/3 6/4

Backing the “Underdog” in the final at Bet365 produced a profit of 73p which when added to our tournament total for backing the underdog at £1.00 level stakes has given us a tournament grand total of £6.03

Laying the seeded player paid off again giving a small profit after commission of 78p

Laying the no 7 seed Paolini at odds of 2.25 has seemed the only sensible bet in the tournament given the odds of the eventual winner, Krejcikova, of 1.8 at the exchange. A profit of 78p was achieved after the reduction of 2% commission and when added to the tournament total for laying each and every one of the top ten seeded players produced an overall profit of £6.95. This is 92p more than backing the underdog at a sportsbook.

Analysis of the tournament.

Without doubt had we laid the top ten seeded players then our profit would have been more than backing the underdog at the bookmaker. However there is the fact that bookmakers need to create at least a 7% overound and we may well have benefited more by backing the underdog at an exchange especially if you have a promotional 0% commission. Without the top seeds falling by the wayside early on in the tournament the profit would have been less or even a loss might have occurred, certainly our profit was boosted by the single fact that Swiatek crashed out in the 3rd round!
Overall a success and in fact a low risk strategy. Laying to a liability of just £1.00 means that we can monitor and control any losses. We can make the lay bets in the knowledge that if we start with a small bank of just £10 and not let any emotion enter into our decisions we can keep this strategy fun.

How the seeded players faired in previous years.

2023

Top 10 Seeds

Swiatek – Lost in Round 4 (Odds 1.19)
Sabalenka – Lost in Semi Finals (Odds 1.7)
Rybakina – Lost in Quarter Finals (Odds 1.71)
Pegula – Lost in Quarter Finals (Odds 1.76)
Garcia – Lost in Round 3 (Odds 2.05)
Jabeur – Lost in The Final (Odds 1.5)
Gauff – Lost in round 1 (Odds 1.34)
Sakkari – Lost in round 1 (Odds 1.36)
Kvitova -Lost in Round 4 (Odds 1.8)
Krejcikova Lost in Round 2 (Odds 1.35)

Swiatek
Reached the 4th round where she lost to Svitolina After losing 3 lay bets at £1.00 each we would have won £5.26 giving a profit of £2.54
Sabalenka
Reached the Semifinals where she lost to Jabeur. After losing 5 lay bets at £1.00 each we would have won £1.43 giving a loss of £3.57
Rybakina
Reached the quarter finals were she lost to Jabeur. After 4 losing lay bets at £1.00 each we would have won £1.41 giving a loss of £2.59
Pegula
Reached the Quarter finals where she lost to Vondrousova. After losing 4 lay bets at £1.00 each we would have won £1.32 giving a loss of £2.68
Garcia
Reached the 3rd round where she lost to Bouzkova. After losing 2 lay bets at £1.00 each we would have won 96p giving a loss of £1.04
Jabeur
Reached the final where she lost to Vondrousova. After losing 6 lay bets at £1.00 each we would have won £2.00 giving a loss of £4.00
Gauff
Lost in the 1st round to Kenin. We would have won £2.94.
Sakkari
Lost in the 1st round to Kostyuk. We would have won £2.78
Kvitova
Reached the 4th Round where she lost to Jabeur. After losing 3 lay bets of £1.00 each we would have won £1.25 giving a loss of 1.75
Krejcikova
Reached the 2nd round where she lost to Andreeva. After just 1 losing lay bet of £1.00 we would have won £2.86 giving a profit of £1.86

Conclusion.

We would have lost £5.51 over the whole tournament this year if we had laid each of the top 10 seeds to the end.

2022

Top 10 seeds

Swiatek – Lost in Round 3 (Odds 1.2) – P/L £3.00
Kontaveit – Lost in Round 2 (Odds 1.50) – P/L £1.00
Jabeur – Reached the Final (Odds 1.83) – P/L -£4.80
Badosa – Reached the 4th Round (Odds 3.4) – P/L -£2.58
Sakkari – Reached the 3rd Round (Odds 1.20) – P/L £3.00
Pliskova – Reached the 2nd round (Odds 1.71) – P/L £0.41
Collins – Lost in the 1st Round (Odds 1.79) – P/L £1.27
Pegula – Reached the 3rd Round (Odds 1.57) – P/L -£0.25
Mugurusa – Lost in the 1st round (Odds 1.25) – P/L £4.00
Raducanu Reached the 2nd Round (Odds 1.70) – P/L £0.43

Conclusion

We would have Won £5.48 over the whole tournament this year if we had laid each of the top 10 seeds to the end.

Betting Insights: Analyzing Provisional Odds for Winners

Yesterday I showed you how to create a basic query in TSMs’ Selection Hunter to find some likely winners using the back test mode to discover any trends and it came up with the following 3 horses
The selections are
13:50 Stage Star
14:25 Copperhead
15:00 Sunray Shadow.

If you missed it you can read the post here

13:50 Stage Star
Stage Star met the provisional odds criteria of between 2.00 and 2.99 but went off at a BSP of 3.21. Our conditions of placing a bet with betangel were that the BSP had to be between 2.00 and 2.99 for the software to trigger. 3.21 was out of our range at 3.21 so no bet was made.

Stage Star only managed 4th out of 5

14:25 Copperhead
Joe Tizzards’ Copperhead also qualified as the provisional odds were posted as 2.85 but again the BSP was outside of the criteria and went off at 3.5 giving us another miss fire from Betangel.
Copperhead Won by 14 lengths!!!

15:00 Sunray Shadow
The final selection was the Skelton trained and ridden Sunray Shadow who’s Provisional odds were posted at 2.5. Winning by a length and a 1/4 the BSP was well within the range at 2.23 and Betangel Fired the bet in 10 seconds before post time catching 2.25

Summary
2 of the 3 selections went off at odds outside the criteria one of them winning but alas one losing
2 of the 3 went off as favourites despite all 3 being ranked as provisional favourite.
Betangel fired just one bet and this returned 125% ROI
Given the strike rate of the criteria when back tested (68%) 2 actual winners from our query seemed to tentatively back this trend.

Cautionary note
While this was a completely genuine test run you should not go out and back every Aintree runner with a BSP of between 2.0 and 2.99 even though I back tested over a period of nearly 2 years results you should always do as much research as you can and start with stakes that you can afford to lose.

Build your bank steadily Racing is not going to finish tommorrow!!!

The staking Machine software has limited use for free but If you want to take advantage of the Selection Hunter you will need to pay – It only costs £24 for 1 year – Twenty Four!! this is not a typo and can be paid via paypal
That’s only 2 quid a month and if you had backed Sunray Shadow for a quid you would have made over 1/2 a months subscription already.

How to Use TSM’s Selection Hunter for Racing Queries

There is a new addition to the TSM armoury called the Selection Hunter and it does exactly what it says! By entering criteria in a series of easy to use drop boxes in its user interface you can quickly build a module/query that shows the runners for today.
As a demonstration I will build a query for todays racing at Aintree using the backtest mode and then post the selections before racing starts.
We need to open the selection hunter first and this is achieved by opening TSM and then clicking on the racecards tab at the top and then clicking on the “UK/IRE Horse Racing Selection Hunter” shown below.

This will open the selection Hunter Interface as shown below.

As you can see I have already produced some queries but for this demonstration I will start from scratch.

To start a new query click the first tick box and then, under criteria, select RaceMeet from the first dropdown box make sure “Like” is populated in the String Op box and Type the race course name into the value box as shown below.

Make sure the Back Test Mode switch is set to on and the date range is Jan 23 – Now by selecting it from the date range drop down box and then Click the run query using settings below at the top of the interface.
This has produced 991 results which in effect is the number of horses that have run at Aintree since January 2023. We need to now analyse this queries results by clicking the box which is arrowed above. This will open the screen shown below

Next click the additional breakdown button arrowed to bring up the following screen.

We can now drill down our query to specific criteria such as Jockey, Trainer, Racerunners etc. For this demonstration I will select odds from this dropdown list to produce the following screen.

From this screen we can determine the optimum odds that produced the greatest strike rate and in this case with a strike rate of 68% odds of 2 to 2.99 BSP produced a return on Investment of 61.4% We can now enter these figures into the Selection Hunter interface as follows.

Under criteria and in the second dropdown box select “Provisional Odds” then in Num Op select >= then in the value box type 2 – this tells the query to look for horses that raced at Aintree in this period that had odds of 2.00 or more
In the next box down select provisional odds again but in the Num Op box select < and the value type 3 – this tells the query to look for horses that had provisional odds of less than 3
Make sure both tick boxes are filled nest to provisional odds and click the Run Query button again This will bring up the next screen shown below.

This is a very basic query which when run with the back test mode switched off will list all todays runners at Aintree that have a provisional starting price between 2.00 and 2.99 as shown below.

Thre are 4 runners today that meet this criteria and if you notice there are 2 selections for the 3 o clock – Sunray Shadow and Takt Des Touques. In the column next to Prov Odds you will see Prov Odds Rank and this is another factor that you can drill the criteria down by as shown below

In the screenshot above I have expanded the interface so this picture is not vey clear but if you click the image you will see a lot more information is readily available for each runner
So we have our short list of runners and with the strike rate of this query being 68% we can expect 2 of the 3 to win as long as the BSP is between 2.00 and 2.99
We can use Betangel to place or bets for us at the BSP range specified. ie 2.00 – 2.99

The selections are
13:50 Stage Star
14:25 Copperhead
15:00 Sunray Shadow.

The Staking Machine Software: Introducing Advanced Strategies – The Percentage Plan.

The “Percentage” staking plan is different to level stakes in the way you link the stake to your profit. With “The Staking Machine” software you can do some very clever things such as applying a different percentage to any profit and adding it to the base stake. In this post I will explore the myriad of settings to discover whether or not we can improve on the level stakes debarcle outlined in the main introductory post. If you have arrived here straight from google or some other entety other than the introduction post you can read it here

Discovering Profitable Staking Plans For Premiership Teams

The first thing to do is to apply our desired settings to the relevant staking plan. To access this feature we click on the “Staking Plans” Tab at the top of the screen and then click the Edit Staking Plans Settings” button on the top left of the screen as shown below.

To begin with we should set our “bank” to the same as level stakes and the initial stake percentage the same. We are also going to set the minimum stake allowed to that of the initial start stake to make the staking machine calculate a stake that will never go below 2.00, this is done by ticking the box marked “Minimum Stake equals start stake” We are also going to tick the box “Re-calculate after x amount of bets” and enter 1 into the box. This will instruct TSM (The Staking Machine) to recalculate the stake after each bet. This can be seen more clearly in the screenshot of TSM below

Click the image to open in a new tab for a clearer view.

As you can see from the top image I have already loaded the data for last seasons Manchester Citys’ games and the software has calculated the stakes using the settings we have just entered, adusting the stakes for any profit or loss made. The same image is shown below and it clearly shows that when there was a profit made the stakes increased but when the cumulative profit became a loss the minimum stake rule kicked in and the minimum stake became £2.00. If we had left the “Minimum Stake Equals Start Stake” box unticked when Man City started losing you can see that the stakes reduced to 2% of our “Bank” – See bets 14 onwards shown below.

When the bank dips below its starting amount i.e. when you are no longer in profit TSM calculates the stake to 2% of the running bank if the minimum stake is unticked.

Because we are using the same data for level stakes as well as the percentage plan TSM can produce for us a graph that compares the two systems alonside each other. This is shown below.

A comparison of how the Percentage plan performed against level stakes using the initial settings determined above.

If you click the image above it will open in a new tab so that you can see from where i hovered my mouse above bet 38 on the percentage plan line that the plan ended with a further 10p loss compared with the level stakes plan. So on first impressions the percentage plan follows the level stakes plan very closely finishing with a very slight greater loss. There is however more setting that we can apply and one of these is to apply a different percentage to any profit and adding this to our base stake of £2.00 as the following shows. To turn this feature on we need to go back to our staking plan settings and tick the “Apply Different Percent % to Bet to any Profits” and enter the percent rate you would like to impement. I have entered 10%, this means that if we are £5 up it will add an additional 50p to the stake as shown below.

The following screenshot shows the increased stakes when this feature is implemented and the image immediately below that shows the normal percentage plan.

As you can see the percentage plan with the increased stakes the bank stands at £104.35 giving a profit of £4.35 where as the basic percentage plan the total is £104.09 or a £4.09 profit. When we start to lose however our increased stake means that on a losing bet the loss is greater. After Man City didn’t win the match against Wolves the basic plan shows a greater profit. If we get TSM to generate a new comparison graph using the new setting and compare it with level stakes the plans still follow similar paths but the percentage plan while rising above the level stakes plan at the end of the season it has under performed it by a further 40p loss.

Click image for a better view in a new tab

In quick summary for Manchester City it would seem that the percentage staking plan would not be suitable for bets involving very short odds even though the strike rate is quite high. What is becoming apparent is that if the strike rate is below the required strike rate determined by the average winning odds then you don’t stand much of a chance and it might be better to commit sacrilege and back your team to lose 😲. This we will explore later.

On to Tottenham and their creditable 5th place last season. As we saw in the introduction post Tottenham had a winning strike rate of 52.6% but their average winning odds of 1.81 dictated a required strike rate of 55.4% so even though the strike rate is still below the required strike rate can we recover losses with increased average odds or are we still doomed to failure and lining the bookies purse even more. The answer I am afraid is we lose even more than with the shorter odds.
The screenshot below (which is another great feature of TSM) shows the comparisons to a greater detail with totals such as highest peak profit and lowest trough loss

You will need to click the image to gain a better and clearer view of this screenshot – it will open in a new tab.

This feature is accessed by clicking the Analysis Comparison button on the main screen which will open in a new window the entire comparison stats for all the staking plans on the system – I have just shown the two that we are looking at so far.
If you click the image above it will open in a new tab so you can see more clearly the data it has produced
The first column shows the largest single stake used so you can get some idea of the stakes involved, With the level staking system the largest and smallests stakes are obviously going to show £2.00 as this is our level stake and that stands to reason. With the Percentage Staking plan with the settings described above the largest single stake was £3.39 and the smallest being £2.00 as we set our stake to be never below this figure or 2% of our starting bank which if you remember was £100.00. In the 5th Column it shows total stakes used and in this case the level staking plan used £76.00 as you would expect (38 games x £2.00). With the percentage plan our total stakes came out at £90.46 The most interesting column for us is the second to last which shows cumulative profit. This is our end of season figure and the Percentage plan under performs the level stakes by £2.80 with the cumulative profit being -£6.54. We can see this a lot clearer with the comparison graph below.

Performance of the Percentage staking plan against the level staking plan for Tottenham 23/24 season

As with the Manchester City analysis we can bring up a bar chart that identifies when Tottenham performed to the match odds this is shown below

This graph shows the number of matches that tottenham played where the win odds are grouped and the number of time they won in those ranges

As you can see when the odds were below 1.5 Tottenham had a 100% strike rate. If we bring up the “Odds Report” we can see that the only grouping of odds where we would have made a profit was 2.0 and below.

Tottenhams strike rate when the match odds for them was below 2.0 was 88.89%

In summary then, using the percentage plan on matches that had win odds of 2.00 or below would have produced a profit of £7.51 over the season or a 41.07% Return on Investment.

We now move onto Crystal Palaces’ data and with £2.00 level stakes we would have profited by 11.48. If we remind ourselves Crystal Palaces winning strike rate was 34.2% for the 23/24 premiership season and they managed a creditable 10th place. Their average winning odds were 3.36 giving a required strike rate of 29.7%.
Using the Percentage Staking Plan with the settings unchanged from the two studies above our maximum single stake would have been £2.88 and again the lowest £2.00. There is another odds report that is available in TSM and the grouping of the odds is a lot more precise see below.

This report groups the odds into more precise bands.

Analysis of this kind can be invaluable as we can identify odds ranges that are more likely to provide a profit for instance if you look at the “Range F” row you will see that the odds range between 2.0 and 2.5 with a total of 10 games in that range with a 60% strike rate. If we tick the box in “Apply Filter” column and click the “Apply Chosen Filters” button at the bottom as shown in the screenshot below then it will populate the main TSM screen with just those results.

By filtering out other odds ranges we can analyse specific results.

By filtering out unwanted odds ranges we can make a more detailed analysis of specefic matches we would be better advised to bet on as shown below.

This screenshot shows just the matches where the match odds for Crystal Palace were just from match odds ranging from 2.0 to 2.5

We can see from the quick stats panel at the bottom of the screen that the strike rate is 60% and the average winning odds from the 6 matches that Crystal Palace won came out at 2.28 requiring a strike rate of 44% to enable us to make a profit. Only backing matches that fall into this sort of odds ranges can make for a dull season but the aim of this small section where i have diverted from the bigger picture is that with detailed analysis such as this and the pure ease that TSM enables this you can analise all the teams in the premiership in this way – or any other league for that matter to improve your profit potential by having separate files for each team and using a plan for each such team individually.

Any way back to the full season comparison between level stakes and percentage plan for Crystal Palaces’ 23/24 season.

Comparison graph for Crystal Palace between Percentage and Level stakes staking plans.

This is the familiar comparison graph showing the track from bet 1 to bet 38 and as we have come to expect they follow each other very closely. In this particular instance the Level Staking plan out performed the percentage plan by 10p over the season.

In summary, generally the level stake staking plan is ahead as far as the ROI factor is concerned but there are factors that you should be aware of. Staking plans can, if the right research is done, provide profit where there is the right correlation between the Ave win odds and strike rates.