Many horse betting online enthusiasts use paper trading to determine whether a horse racing system or staking strategy is as useful as they hope it will be. Paper trading involves keeping records of bets, results, profits and losses without actually betting, and is therefore a risk-free exercise. Unfortunately, it is also a profit-free exercise, and if you paper trade a particular system or strategy for several months and make a theoretical profit of £20,000, then that’s all you would have – a theoretical profit. In the real world, you wouldn’t be even one penny richer!

An alternative to paper trading for extensive periods is to move beyond paper trading after a short time and progress to micro-stakes trading. This is where you place real bets with the online bookmakers of your choice, but using minimum stakes so that your exposure to the risk of losing is still very low.

For example, you could paper trade a system for seven days and then, if the paper trading shows a profit, establish a small bankroll and start betting for real in £2 units instead of £20 units. This would give you a profit if the system continues to be profitable (as you obviously hope it will) but still keep potential losses to a minimum if you don’t pick as many winners as you had expected.

Another advantage to betting with micro-stakes instead of paper trading is that the use of real money makes you take the exercise more seriously. Many people paper trade as if they have nerves of steel, then switch to using serious stakes and discover that they lose their nerve completely because they now have some real cash on the line. Betting with micro-stakes would give such bettors a much more accurate idea about whether or not they would be prepared to follow the same system using larger real-money stakes in the future.

If you wanted yet another good reason to consider betting with micro-stakes instead of paper trading, consider the fact that online bookmakers are currently offering generous bonuses to new players. You could open an account with a new bookmaker, collect your bonus and use that money to bet with alongside your own cash. That would effectively give you more to play with from the outset, and is a much better approach than paper trading for a few months only to discover, when you want to bet for real, that the bonuses are no longer available!

Paper trading will always be a useful short-term way to ‘test the water’ with new horse betting systems or staking strategy, but theoretical profits simply aren’t useful in the real world. Going beyond paper trading as we have discussed here could help you to start making real cash profits from a successful system sooner rather than later.