If you are a beginner and don’t know what settings to choose, just rely on the recommended beginner settings. You can, of course, change settings yourself later on if you want.
Kelly criterion stake sizing strategy
Value betting has a built-in staking strategy: Kelly criterion for stake sizing. This will ensure optimal profits, but you can also use it to lower risk. Default Kelly is set to 30%.
Maximum stake
Default max stake is 1.5% of your current bankroll (your total investment). This is commonly called one “unit” in sports betting when you don’t want to divulge how much money you have. Limiting your bet size is important to handle risk and variance.
Maximum odds
Default settings are minimum odds of 1.40 and maximum odds 2.90. Don’t bet on the highest odds just because they give the highest value. Higher odds are less likely to result in a win and will increase the variance. You can decrease the odds range to further reduce variance, for example, 1.60 to 2.80.
Minimum and maximum value
Value betting has default settings to show a minimum value of 3% and a maximum value of 20%. Betting on higher value will over time increase your yield (and your profits), and give you a larger buffer against shifting odds. If you have enough bets, try increasing the minimum value to 4%.
Time to match start
The default setting is 48 hours. Matches that are played more than 48 hours in the future will be hidden. Increase time to match start as high as you can while still maximizing turning per day. You don’t want to let your bankroll sit unused while you wait for matches to end. This might be 12 hours for users with smaller bankrolls or 300 (our maximum) for those with large bankrolls. The reason is that we found no correlation between time to match start and (flat) profit. There was no correlation between closing line value, flat profit or whether you beat the closing line.
Check out the Value betting manual and quick start guide for more information.