Quick staking tips!

Oct 18, 2021

Does it matter what Attack style I’m using?

Your attack style definitely matters and it can improve your odds marginally, which makes a significant impact if you do hundreds of stakes. While you may think attack styles are useless and are only for choosing what skill you get experience in, they actually provide invisible stat bonuses.

Deflect: using this style grants you +3 defence.

Lash: this style adds +1 attack, +1 strength and +1 defense.

Flick: this style adds +3 attack, which makes you incredibly accurate.

The strength bonus provided by the lash style is meaningless. Strength only increases your max hit to a limit, not very useful if you are already 99 strength.

So, how do we use these attack styles to increase our chances when duelling? When you’re about to attack, use flick for that all-important accuracy. Even if you’re both about to attack at the same time, use flick. When you’ve landed your hit and are about to be hit yourself, use deflect to minimise any damage you may receive. These two rules will ensure you have the best odds, even if it’s down to a few percentage points: it is meaningful in the long-run. This is some of the best advice from our OSRS staking guide.

What is X-Staking?

Previously, odds staking was a huge problem but unknown to the majority of the players. It was also referred to as ‘X-staking’. To further understand this, let’s take a look at an example. Assuming two players are staking, one with all 99s, and the second player with all 99s except 98 defence. The 99 defense player wants to stake for 10 million GP. The 98-defence player puts up a stake for 9 million GP due to lacking a defence level. Whilst we won’t go into the exact maths and formulas here, the lacking of 1 defence level does not make a 10% difference, and most players don’t understand this. The stake should be 10 million to 9.8 million, or something similar to that.

Fortunately, odds staking is no longer an issue in official stakes. Jagex only allows stakes to have a value of (plus or minus) 10k GP between each other. In addition, with this update, they introduced a tax to all stakes. If you stake between 1 GP to less than 10 million GP, you are taxed at 0.25%. 10 million GP to less than 100 million GP is staked at 0.50%. 100 million GP or higher are taxed at a staggering 1.00%. The sole purpose of this taxation is to act as a gold sink – to remove gold from the economy, to reduce inflation. As a result, trillions are removed from the game every day, to counter-balance shops and high alchemy introducing GP in.

You may be wondering: great, you’ve told me all this, but it isn’t relevant today? And that’s where you are wrong. Many people will try to scam you through this but through unofficial means. There are underground stakers who do these stakes by actually submitting nothing through the stake interface. They use middlemen and clans to do these stakes for the purpose of avoiding taxation, meaning both parties trade the GP to a ranked middleman. It is not recommended to participate in this whatsoever unless you completely know what you are doing, and if you do, don’t fall for odds staking. This ain't possible anymore. 

What should I not do?

There’s only one thing to be avoided, and that is being scammed. For this, ensure to triple-check your opponent’s inventory alongside the duel settings chosen. For example, if you aren’t vigilant, your opponent may bring in a Ghrazi Rapier in their inventory and leave the ‘no weapon switch’ option disabled.

Another common scam is with a Maple Shortbow, and there are more variants than you can count. You should not engage in stakes that you do not have a full understanding of. Your opponent may provide you with rune arrows to stake with, however, the Maple Shortbow cannot fire rune arrows. In this case, they’d either have adamant arrows for themselves or rune arrows themselves but with a Toxic Blowpipe with the ‘no weapon switch’ enabled. Despite the setting, they can empty the Toxic Blowpipe and use the darts to kill you.

What to do when I don’t have a maxed account?

If you currently don't have a max main to stake on (99 att, 99 str, 99 def) you can rent it from our shop. It only costs around 7.95M an hour and will allow you to stake on one of our accounts. If you are interested, all you need to do is contact livechat and they will instruct you on what needs to be done!