The web abounds with various outright tipster scams and wannabe pro tipsters. Some of the few things they all seem to have in common is an eagerness to take your hard earned money and an inability to actually provide you with anything of value.
The Guardian made a test a little over a year ago. They equipped Lloyd Griffith, a character (Gut Truster) from a British 2014 commercial for Ladbrokes, with a team of professionals, but even so he was unable to turn a profit.
It has been claimed that Voltaire once said that “lotteries is a tax on stupidity”. It is easy to see where he was coming from and what he said seems to hold true not only for lotteries but also other forms of gambling.
Unless you have inside knowledge about a sport it is possible to bet on, or the skill set and work ethic required to build a model able to predict the likelihood of the various outcomes, better than the betting market. Betting is doomed to be some sort of a tax for almost everyone taking part in the activity.
If most people are doomed to lose if they decide what to bet themselves, and most tipsters exist merely for the pleasure of ripping you off, how is it possible to make money betting on sports?
For most people it is just not possible and they should accept that and either act as recreational punters, betting only small stakes or they should just walk away from the activity completely.
If you are unwilling to take any of those two options, you should go looking for a tipster. However, you will need to be smart about it.
The reality is that acting as a tipster can make sense even for winning punters. There are several reasons for this. The tipster can have great difficulty getting decent sized wagers down with the betting companies, who are infamous for their dislike of winning customers. Or the tipster’s bankroll can be limited, making him unable to place large wagers.
In both the above circumstances obtaining another revenue stream as a tipster would make sense.
Furthermore some websites actually pay tipsters to provide tips on their websites. The reason behind this is likely that the website owners see it as a way to get traffic on their sites.
However as with most things connected to gambling you need to be extremely cautious. Some websites have tipsters who will lose intentionally in order for the websites to earn affiliate payments from the betting companies.
So considering how dirty the world of online gambling is, how can you identify which tipsters to safely follow?
This is not a simple question to answer, but I would start by looking for a tipster capable not only of winning, but also of beating the closing line.
This is likely because most tipsters are unable to actually beat the closing line. Using simulations it is easy to show that for samples between 100 and 2000 tips it is much easier to achieve an actual profit than to beat the closing line value. This is because there is far more variance in the outcome of the tips than in the closing odds.
As shown by the simulations in the above article it is much harder to beat the closing line value in the short to medium term, than to just have an actual profit on the betting tips. I would look for tipsters having both an actual profit, but also a closing line value profit.
To find that you first need to find tipsters displaying their closing line value statistics.
Secondly I would look for tipsters making tips for minor betting sports. The reason for this is that minor betting sports are much easier to beat than more turnover intensive propositions, as this is the case it should be much easier to find profitable tipsters for such sports.
One of my favourite sources for such free betting tips is Investobet.com. Unfortunately the tipsters on Investobet were a lot more active in the past, but I still think it possible to find some really good tips there.
