Tipsters: How To Find The Winners (And Avoid The Losers)

Here at the Smart Betting Club, our primary role is to help YOU find the best profit making tipsters around.

As part of that quest, we proof hundreds of tipster services every week, who are each hoping to make the grade and prove to us that they are worthy of a recommendation.

I am sure it will come as no surprise that for every GOOD tipster, there are a hundred others YOU need to avoid. I’m not just talking about scams (such as the tipster who is lifting free tips and selling them on as his own – more about him soon hopefully), but tipsters that are often profitable…based purely on luck and not skill.

We see it all too often – a tipster that enjoys blistering form for the first 6 or 12 months and looks outstanding, only for results to then tail off and for them to disappear into the sunset.

If you start following them at the wrong time or indeed too soon, then you can easily be caught out (with a hefty dent in your wallet).

How To Pick A Skilful Tipster – Not A Lucky One

To investigate this, SBC published an article written by Mike Lindley of the Winabobatoo service in our latest magazine, which examines how luck can impact a tipster’s results.

To help explain, Mike used an example of what might happen if we analysed 50 different tipster services over the course of a year. For the purposes of his exercise, each tipster worked to the same odds range, advised 200 bets over a year and had a 5% profit margin.

Mike ran these results through a simulator to calculate what we could expect to see in an average year for these 50 tipsters, simply based on luck.

As the table below reveals, the results are wildly different. We could expect to see as many as 4 out of the 50 tipsters make a 20% profit or higher in their first year.

Conversely at the bottom end, 2 tipsters will make a loss of 20% ROI or worse – for no other reason than luck.

Tipsters Luck Vs Skill

So tallying it all up, this study concluded that despite each tipster having identical methods, there was a 68.7% chance that a tipster will be in profit, and a 31.3% chance the tipster will make a loss.

Two Key Elements To Choosing A Good Tipster

So the $64 million dollar question has to be…how can we judge a tipster properly, especially if luck is such a huge factor?

Well there are two simple ways

1) The number of bets made during the assessment period.

The more bets a tipster has under their belt, then the nearer to reality the figures will be (and luck with have less of an impact).

2) The odds of the bets placed

The odds are vitally important as you need to treat tipsters differently based on them.

For example a football tipster that picks bets at an average of 6/4 will need different analysis to a racing tipster that selects bets at an average of 33/1. Just one or two lucky 33/1 winners will have a massive impact on results for the racing tipster, yet a couple of lucky 6/4 winners will have a marginal impact for the football tipster.

In essence, the best way to weigh up if a tipster is genuinely good…is time and lots of it! Anyone can have a lucky month or two, but beating the bookie over several years takes skill.

Key Components Of An SBC Tipster Review

We take all of the above into consideration when building up a review of any tipster service here at the Smart Betting Club.

It may infuriate a tipster to be told we need at least 12 months worth of results (and often a lot more) before we will review them, but we know if they are as good as they suggest, they will prove this long-term (and if they won’t wait 12 months, they probably aren’t of the right professional mindset).

In fact, of the 22 tipsters that are currently in our Hall of Fame, together they have an average age of 45 months  combined (nearly 4 years) – thus helping we think to ensure their results are down to skill not luck.

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Best regards,

Peter – SBC Editor

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