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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

