Ok, heres my more detailed thoughts/ramblings on the subject of Selections v Staking v Psychology. Obviously doing any one of them badly can ruin you so they are all important, however if I had to rank them I would do so as follows:

1. Selection System/Methodology
I rank this first as it is the foundation of becoming a successful punter. As has been said numerous times before no amount of creative staking can save a system that does not show a profit on the basic selections. Similarly it doesn't matter how good your psychology is you still will not win if you can come up with selections that show a profit. Also I believe it is the hardest one of the three to develop so it probably deserves to be the area you should concentrate on initially (no point wasting time working on the other two if you can't crack this one - find another hobby/job instead).

2. Psychology
Once you have a selection system/method that works then the next most important thing is getting the psychology right (I am still working on this). To a certain extent the psychology required is similar to that needed for share trading. I think you need to be able to ignore the actual money involved and just focus on your plan/system - it shouldn't matter whether you are $1000 up or $1000 down for the day you need to treat each bet on its merits. As Equine Investor said you need patience, self discipline and faith in the system otherwise you can cost yourself a lot of money through either over aggressiveness (not enough patience/self discipline to wait for the right bet) or being too cautious (not having enough faith to place a bet your system has indicated is a valid bet).

3. Staking
In my book staking comes a long last to the other two. As I have mentioned many times before I don't believe any staking plan can improve your POT in the long run so the main purpose here should be to insure your bets are sized appropriately to maximise the return. This means making sure your bets are not too big otherwise you will destroy your bank if you hit a run of outs. If the bet size is too small you will miss out on potential profits from your winners. I personally use a 1% of bank rule (so if my bank is $10000 then the maximum bet is $100 - if my bank falls to $9000 then bet is $90, if it increases to $11000 then bet is $110). The 1% comes from the fact I am generally betting on 10-1 chances to win - obviously you need to work out a % appropriate for your type of betting. Also if you are betting with TAB with larger bets you also need to consider how much you can bet into the pool without affecting the odds too much.

In my opinion the reason most betting systems fail is due to factor 1 - the wrong selections. A system itself cannot fail due to Psychology (although an individual punter may lose money with a winning system due to bad psychology). Many systems try to use elaborate (or simple) loss chasing staking plans to make a profit and inevitably fail in the long run, however the real cause of the failure is not the staking system but rather the fact the selections do not make a profit at level stakes (the staking plan just hides the problem until the inevitable crash).

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