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I went to the duel arena with my last 2m cash stack and....

Hi everyone. I have a lot of friends who "go to the arena", sometimes they win, sometimes they lose. But eventually you hear almost anyone telling how staking is addictive, you will lose bank, etc. So here - Have my guide on staking. I'll explain staking from a scientific point of view. Facts 1. Staking is a purely statistical game As long as you don't magebox with obstacles on (which is dead anyways) or something similar, you will have boxing matches between relatively equally strong accounts. Statistically, staking like this is like flipping a coin. Over a long period, you will win as often as you lose (always given, that the accounts are equally strong). This is called the "law of the big number". In this case, your expected value will be zero, so after having many many single stakes, you will neither win, nor lose money. 2. First hit, PID, etc. are overrated for boxing I often here friends get mad because they got cleaned "by someones they had PID against". Again, keep in mind that staking is purely statistical. For longer fights (boxing) the impact of first hit or PID will be much less relevant than in short fights (Whip). But generally, it's overrated. If you did the math you would see, that for example in a fight with 30 executed hits (as in boxing) or more, an extra hit increases your win chances only minimally. 3. Style switching is underrated Switching your combat styles - In RuneScape Classic it gave a +3 bonus on Attack, Strength or Defense. In OSRS we don't really know what it does, but the players assume it works the same way. Compared to first hits, this technique is statistically worth a lot more and it should be used. Switching between Attack and Defense is the best way (For that, see more later). Interestingly, even experienced stakers on streams or YT-Videos seem to have timing issues with this. Your Style must be switched when you/the opponent get their XP-Drops, not when they do the actual hit. You would be surprised to see how many people do this wrong. 4. x-ing is unbalanced as hell One friend of me was actually making a lot of money after beginning to "x" other players, meaning: If you fight someone who has a slight advantage over you (Let's say 5 Attack Levels) they must stake 1.2x what you stake. Realize, how 1.2x means an actual increase of 20%, while 5 Attack Levels will give you much less than a 20% higher win ratio. Don't be the one to fall for people trying to convince you to "x" them, just because you have a slight advantage. 5. "Doubling" (the mertingale method) does not work Especially in 2011-2012 many players thought they had found the ultimate way to profit from staking. At this time the Internet was flooded with ads explaining, how you could "always win in roulette by doubling your input after losing a stake". I'm sure you are aware of this. People are usually easily baited by this false method, because even with very low win chances (down to 13% if you can double a few times) you'd still profit. The reason why this method doesn't work is a bit more complicated, but mathematically true and undenieable. Basically the logic is: You will have a lot of wins with low profit, and few losses with big losses. Given a 50% win chance your expected value would be zero, so again - It's mathematically proven that there is no way to have "specific strategies" in a game of luck to have a guaranteed (or increased) profit. And yes, in this context, mathematical prove is very strong. This area is called "Game Theory" (a sub-area of statistics). There are actual professors in university studying this. 6. Misinterpretation of winning and losing streaks A very nooby mistake is to believe that your odds of winning increase after losing a few times (and vice versa). Staking is a "Laplace Experiment" meaning that your odds always stay the same over time. Even if you lost 100 times in a row, your chance of winning is still 50%, just as when you flip a coin. Also, I've heard people complain on how they were "bs'ed by the game because they had 7 losses in a row". Having many losses in a row is actually much more likely to happen than our instinct suggests. For mathematical backgrounds, look up "Bernoulli calculator" or read the Wikipedia article on Binominal Distributions. 7. The most important rule. As you've seen, I have explained most points with basic math. The reason is: In statistics, most processes have exponential terms in it, etc. However, humans can't think exponentially (we can only think linearly). That's why you must always believe in the math, even if your instinct tells you something very different. Conclusion Making money with staking is possible in just two ways: 1: You find someone who is stupid and doesn't know the laws of statistics. Then you can rip them off. But nowadays, players are much more cautious then in 2011-2012. Everybody checks up stats with OSBuddy etc. 2: You actually manage to calculate odds for every possible combination of stats and then only fight people over whom you have a >50% winning chance. Finding the formula for this will be extremely hard, since it would require peaces of the OSRS code (which is compiled, obviously). I hope I could bring some light to those who still believe, the arena is their way to get rich "if they just do it right". Now you know, there's hardly a way to do it right. Regards, Simply