How To Judge Just How Potent A Tipster Really Is

Those of you who have spent time researching and following different betting tipsters will know how difficult it can be at times to know exactly how much money they can make you. This is because tipsters (especially the Arfur Daley types) often use many different misleading calculations in order to show their own results in a good light.

The good news is that help is at hand as I want to unravel a few such dodgy tipster practices and also show you one calculation we use here at the Smart Betting Club, which gives you the straight facts on any tipster.

Let’s start off with the ugly side of tipster reporting with a few classic examples of misleading figures that some of the worst tipsters use…

  • Selective Results Reporting
  • Claiming the past 3 months results will have made you £5000, when the 3 months prior to that may have lost you £8000! 
  • Poor Return For Your Investment
  • Claiming to have made £1000 profit, however you would needed to have risked £100,000 in order to make that.
    Ridiculously High Stakes

    Tipsters that work to £500 per bet to try and make their profit figures look more impressive.

It can be a jungle out there trying to find the right tipster but one way to ignore these misleading stats is to use a simple calculation called Return on Capital.

Capital One

Return on Capital (or ROC) is a really effective measure that translates how much your money has grown in relation to its starting point. It is a simple percentage figure, which is very easy to calculate – even Robbie Savage could work it out!
Although if Robbie does join us here at SBC, he will see we also produce the ROC each month for every service we monitor.

To explain ROC, say for example you put £5000 into a high interest account and at the end of the year you had £6000. Well your profit is £1000, but your ROC is the percentage increase, which in this instance is 20%.

(To get this figure simply divide 100 by your starting amount – £5000 and then multiply by the profit – £1000).

Sadly, these days you are very unlikely to get anywhere near that amount of ROC from £5000 in traditional savings accounts.

This is why more and more people are turning to alternative ways of investing their money – such as through betting, where with the right people guiding you, the ROC can be very appealing.

The ROC From Our Best Services

To help explain how useful ROC is a bit further, I am going to show you the exact ROC amounts for each of the 9 top-rated racing tipsters we recommended in 2010. If you have yet to do so, you can see all the profit figures for each of these tipsters at this blog post, but in the table below are the exact ROC figures.

To unpack this table further, we recommend a betting bank figure for each service (2nd column) and next to that you can see the points profit for 2010 that this service made. In the final column is the exact Return on Capital amount in percentage terms.

The top performer was Service 7, with a whopping 455% increase in 2010. To put that in financial terms, if you had started the year with £5000, this would have become £27,552 by the end of it.

Of course they are by far and away the top performers, but still any of Services 3 through to 9 would have made at least 23.72% up to 147.27% ROC.

Much more than any bank is going to offer you in the current economic climate!

And if you find yourself approached by a tipster claiming results that look too good to be true, be sure to ask them about their own Return on Capital. If they don’t know what this is or refuse to answer, then you may well have dodged a bullet!

Find out More

If you find these kind of stats helpful then you will love our monthly Tipster Report, which gives you the latest ROC for around 35 of the very best tipsters out there. We also calculate other useful figures for you, such as Strike-Rate, ROI and our very own power ranking, which we call ROI+.

All of these stats are provided for the most recent month, past 6 and 12 months as well as all-time performance. You have every possible stat to make the most accurate and informed choice as to the tipster(s) that will make you the most money!

Sign up today for instant access with a Smart Betting Club membership.

Mike's Football Bets 13th January

We have a very competitive looking weekend of Premier League action coming up with 3 big derbies and a crunch game down at White Hart Lane. No doubt all police leave will have been cancelled this weekend!

My strongest bet of the weekend comes up at the Stadium of Light where Sunderland are what looks to be a far too generous 2.23 with 2 bookies to beat Newcastle. Perhaps too much is being made of the 5-1 reverse thrashing but the facts are that the Black Cats have a very strong home record indeed, winning 6, drawing 4 and losing just 1 this season. I’m not at all convinced that Alan Partridge (sorry, Pardew) will be right for the Geordies and I make the home win probability towards a 50% chance, much better than the 44% that the 2.23 odds indicate. The one concern is that Newcastle have been such a Jekyll and Hyde team so it depends what side of bed they all get out of that morning especially. Andy Carroll if not fit will be a big miss as well.

Another team who have made their home ground a bit of a fortress is Spurs who are as big as 2/1 to see off Man Utd on Sunday. Remarkably only Wigan have come away from the Lane with all 3 pts this season and United have won only 2 games on the road, both of which were far from convincing narrow victories at Stoke and West Brom. They seem to have missed Rooney’s usual cut and thrust away this season and are vulnerable down the flanks, especially at right back so Gareth Bale could be key. A draw for me looks likely, followed by a home win so I am taking the +0.25 Asian Handicap on Spurs at 1.78 with 12bet.

These 2 games apart its slim pickings this weekend although I am placing my first bet on Blackpool in the outright match market for this season. West Brom are struggling for quality defensively with a few key players out and could be overwhelmed by Blackpool’s attacking instincts who  will be full of confidence after doing the double over Liverpool. A shortlist bet on the Tangerines with a +0.75 Asian Handicap at 1.96 with Pinnacle and 188bet is the approach here.

My only other interest this weekend was potentially over at Anfield where Liverpool are a very big looking 2.29 to beat Everton at home. I have passed this over as a bet due to my policy of not betting heavily on teams that have undergone recent changes (such as a new manager). Still Liverpool have a pretty decent record and at 2.29, this indicates a 43.6% chance of victory for the home side, which may offer value. No bet for me but will watch with interest.

Main Bets
1 pt Sunderland to beat Newcastle  2.23 Canbet/SBObet
1 pt Spurs (+0.25 AH) V Man Utd. 1.78 12bet/Canbet/SBObet/188bet

Shortlist Bets
1 pt Blackpool (+0.75 AH) V West Brom. 1.96 Pinnacle/188bet

Whatever you bet on, good luck!

Mike

Mike’s Football Bets 13th January

We have a very competitive looking weekend of Premier League action coming up with 3 big derbies and a crunch game down at White Hart Lane. No doubt all police leave will have been cancelled this weekend!

My strongest bet of the weekend comes up at the Stadium of Light where Sunderland are what looks to be a far too generous 2.23 with 2 bookies to beat Newcastle. Perhaps too much is being made of the 5-1 reverse thrashing but the facts are that the Black Cats have a very strong home record indeed, winning 6, drawing 4 and losing just 1 this season. I’m not at all convinced that Alan Partridge (sorry, Pardew) will be right for the Geordies and I make the home win probability towards a 50% chance, much better than the 44% that the 2.23 odds indicate. The one concern is that Newcastle have been such a Jekyll and Hyde team so it depends what side of bed they all get out of that morning especially. Andy Carroll if not fit will be a big miss as well.

Another team who have made their home ground a bit of a fortress is Spurs who are as big as 2/1 to see off Man Utd on Sunday. Remarkably only Wigan have come away from the Lane with all 3 pts this season and United have won only 2 games on the road, both of which were far from convincing narrow victories at Stoke and West Brom. They seem to have missed Rooney’s usual cut and thrust away this season and are vulnerable down the flanks, especially at right back so Gareth Bale could be key. A draw for me looks likely, followed by a home win so I am taking the +0.25 Asian Handicap on Spurs at 1.78 with 12bet.

These 2 games apart its slim pickings this weekend although I am placing my first bet on Blackpool in the outright match market for this season. West Brom are struggling for quality defensively with a few key players out and could be overwhelmed by Blackpool’s attacking instincts who  will be full of confidence after doing the double over Liverpool. A shortlist bet on the Tangerines with a +0.75 Asian Handicap at 1.96 with Pinnacle and 188bet is the approach here.

My only other interest this weekend was potentially over at Anfield where Liverpool are a very big looking 2.29 to beat Everton at home. I have passed this over as a bet due to my policy of not betting heavily on teams that have undergone recent changes (such as a new manager). Still Liverpool have a pretty decent record and at 2.29, this indicates a 43.6% chance of victory for the home side, which may offer value. No bet for me but will watch with interest.

Main Bets
1 pt Sunderland to beat Newcastle  2.23 Canbet/SBObet
1 pt Spurs (+0.25 AH) V Man Utd. 1.78 12bet/Canbet/SBObet/188bet

Shortlist Bets
1 pt Blackpool (+0.75 AH) V West Brom. 1.96 Pinnacle/188bet

Whatever you bet on, good luck!

Mike

A Year in Racing Tipsters

 

With the start of the New Year, it’s an optimal time to update you all on the progress of the 9 Hall of Fame racing tipsters I have been blogging about in the past few months, which you can also familiarise yourself with via my 2 previous articles from November and December.

The big question therefore now that 2010 is done, is just what the exact figures were for the full 12 months if you followed each racing tipster in on every bet they supplied that year.

That includes betting in all types of races, weather, courses and conditions and with all manner of race distances, jockeys, trainers and form to consider.

My Granny might be able to make a profit over 10 bets simply by sheer luck, but over a full 12 months and a large number of bets – it takes real skill to eke out a profit.

2010 IN FULL!

Here in full therefore are the complete statistics for the 9 racing tipsters services that are part of our Smart Betting Club Hall of Fame…

(Please note – the actual names of each tipster have been protected and are available to full SBC members only).

As this table reveals there has been some outstanding results from this group of tipsters, with Service’s 3, 6 and 9 all achieving a Return on Investment of over 20%. What this means is that for every £100 you risked, you would win back at least £20 in profit. In fact 8 out of these 9 have all made a profit with only Service’s 1 and 2 making a small loss and profit respectively and so letting the side down slightly.

Here at the Smart Betting Club, many of our members follow these tipsters together and combined all 9 would have made £9124 at just £10 stakes. On a basic points profit level this equates to 912.4 pts over the full year from 6838 bets at a ROI of 13.83%. Whichever way you look at it, the profits have been very strong and we have no reason not to expect this to be replicated in 2011.

A Storming December!

Those of you who have been following these blog posts may well be keen to know the final progress since I last updated on the 6th December (Read here). How exactly did the 9 tipsters fare in the last month of the year? This is especially relevant when you consider the arctic conditions across much of the UK, which made punting very tricky at times.

Well the answer is that despite the weather, the majority of tipsters actually thrived and ended up posting a fantastic profit in December as these stats reveal…

Easily the most outstanding performer in December was Service 3, which picked up a 24.4 pt profit from the 24 bets advised at an amazing 131.89% Return on Investment. Noticeably 5 more tipsters also made a ROI in advance of 20%, with only Service 1 and Service 9 posting a loss.

Once again if we combined all 9 into a Racing Tipster portfolio, the returns are outstanding with a 28.86% ROI and over £4610 at just £50 stakes from 373 bets.

Horses for courses – Sensible money management

Of course, in reality, it wouldn’t make sense to simply lump £50 on every bet. Some tipsters have a higher strike rate or bet turnover than others meaning you’d burn through your money prematurely unless you set up a proper betting bank.

For example in the whole of 2010, Service 7 advised 3654 bets, whilst Service 3 only gave out 259. It would be wrong to place the same amount of money on each bet so  we adjust the amounts we place based upon each service and its strategy.

For example – in the table below we have £80 on each Service 3 bet and £25 on each Service 7 bet.

By using some sensible money management and employing what we call betting banks, you can make your betting much more efficient.

Below is an example of the type of staking and subsequent profit levels we would suggest for each service this season.

The average stake works out to be around £70 per point risked. The total profit via this method for all 9 services would be £35,450.64 and you would also have the peace of mind that you are staking correctly on each service.

Now we’re not suggesting everyone should follow all of these racing tipsters, but it does give you an idea of the importance of varying your stakes depending on the service.

Help Is At Hand

If you are not familiar with the idea of a betting bank and are keen to find out more, than help is at hand as a member of the Smart Betting Club.

As a new member you can access all our beginner’s advice on money management, which contains easy to follow guidance on how to apply all of this to your own betting.

The learning curve for understanding it all is low and once you have a grasp on it, you could see your betting improve exponentially just like many of our members.

Also, if you’re keen to find out all the details on the 9 racing tipsters above, their identities and how you can start following them, all of this is available as a Smart Betting Club member.

We place thousands of pounds ourselves each week following these tipsters so as always we put our money where our mouth is.

Sign up for a Smart Betting Club membership here today.

Mike’s Football Bets 7th January

It’s been a hectic period of fixtures over the Christmas and New Year for Premier League teams, although some respite this week with the FA Cup taking place. As such I won’t be advising any bets as I prefer to concentrate solely on the Premier League and avoid the lottery that comes with the knock-out tournaments.

It’s perhaps therefore a good time for a re-cap on where we are now that we are just past halfway through the season. Way back in August, my clear goal was to continue to see if I could establish a long-term profit of a decent standard through the use of 3 main bets – Asian Handicaps, Over/under goals and straight 1X2 bets in the English Premier League. The good news is that I have been able to hit those straps, with my 2010/11 record now providing a 8.25 pt profit from 71 bets thus far (12.14% ROI). This follows on from the 10.66 pts profit (13.75% ROI) I managed in 8 months of the 2009/10 season.

Check out the table below for full details on Main bet performance

MonthBetsStakesProfitROI
2009/106377.510.6613.75%
2010/1171688.2512.14%
Overall134145.518.9113.00%

.
I still want to re-iterate that this is still a work in progress and I would hate to think anyone is placing large sums of money on any of my selections just yet! It’s all about building up a strong record over the long-term, but at least we look as though we are heading in the right direction.

I will be back either in midweek if there are any bets on the Blackpool – Liverpool game or next weekend, when we have a full card in the Premier League once again.

Mike

Mike's Football Bets 7th January

It’s been a hectic period of fixtures over the Christmas and New Year for Premier League teams, although some respite this week with the FA Cup taking place. As such I won’t be advising any bets as I prefer to concentrate solely on the Premier League and avoid the lottery that comes with the knock-out tournaments.

It’s perhaps therefore a good time for a re-cap on where we are now that we are just past halfway through the season. Way back in August, my clear goal was to continue to see if I could establish a long-term profit of a decent standard through the use of 3 main bets – Asian Handicaps, Over/under goals and straight 1X2 bets in the English Premier League. The good news is that I have been able to hit those straps, with my 2010/11 record now providing a 8.25 pt profit from 71 bets thus far (12.14% ROI). This follows on from the 10.66 pts profit (13.75% ROI) I managed in 8 months of the 2009/10 season.

Check out the table below for full details on Main bet performance

MonthBetsStakesProfitROI
2009/106377.510.6613.75%
2010/1171688.2512.14%
Overall134145.518.9113.00%

.
I still want to re-iterate that this is still a work in progress and I would hate to think anyone is placing large sums of money on any of my selections just yet! It’s all about building up a strong record over the long-term, but at least we look as though we are heading in the right direction.

I will be back either in midweek if there are any bets on the Blackpool – Liverpool game or next weekend, when we have a full card in the Premier League once again.

Mike

Mike's Football Bets 3rd January

Let down by a 90th minute Joe Cole goal in the last round of fixtures and its proven to be a tricky period with so many games in such a short period of time (too many if you ask me!)

I expect some tired legs with the huge number of games played recently so there could well be goals a plenty. I think both the overs lines in the Blackpool and Fulham games offer some excellent value. The Bolton AH -0.75 line would also be a main bet were if not for worries over the number of fit players they will have for this game (They only had 4 subs in the Liverpool game!).

Please note there will be no Premier League games this coming weekend as we have the FA Cup 3rd round instead.

Main Bets
1.5 pts Over 2.5 goals – Blackpool V Birmingham. 2.07 Canbet/SBOBet
1 pt Over 2.5 goals – Fulham V West Brom. 2.26 SBOBet

Shortlist Bets
1 pt Fulham (-0.25 AH) V West Brom. 1.88 Pinnacle/12Bet
1 pt Bolton (-0.75 AH) V Wigan. 1.98 Canbet/SBOBet

Whatever you bet on, good luck!

Mike