You can’t have a blog about sports betting without dedicating an entry to tipsters , those figures who take all the glamor in the world of ‘ sports investing ‘, but who are they really?
Who are the tipsters?
A tipster is an online gaming professional , who is dedicated to offering predictions of the results of certain events to his clients in exchange for a subscription fee.
What you really buy when you pay a tipster for a subscription is, above all, their sports forecasts, but also their knowledge about sports betting management. Let’s analyze this:
Sports betting predictions: when we value a tipster’s knowledge of a sport or league, we are not talking about knowing the name of the right back of a soccer team. They really have to know about that sport.
The bookmakers have thousands of data and statistics about the teams that participate in each match that they publish. They have the experience of thousands of matches to know how much each event influences at each moment, and they have a lot of technological power to calculate this.
Let’s think, for example, of a soccer game that goes 0 – 0 in the 80th minute, and in the 81st minute a goal is scored. Statistics tell us that there is a 71% chance that another goal will not be scored until the final whistle… in league games. In the cup games, that statistic increases to 87%. And these figures vary depending on whether the one who has scored the goal is the local or the visitor, if we talk about the Spanish league or the German…
Bookmakers have this information, and adjust their odds accordingly. The tipsters… surely not.
This is not to say that a tipster cannot regularly beat bookmakers. Sport is sensations, and a good analyst with intuition can beat the best statistician. But not everyone can do it, simply because the difficulty is enormous.
Tipster management: knowing how to forecast is not enough, a good tipster must know how to bet. Anyone can tell you that in a Barcelona – Leganés, the favorite is Barça, but… Is it always a good bet? At an odd of 2.00 (if Barça wins, they pay you 2 euros for each one you bet) surely yes.
At odds of 1.05 (they pay you 5 cents for every euro you bet)… probably not. Let’s not forget that being the favorite does not mean that you will always win.
There are concepts such as stake management, knowledge of the odds and the odds behind it, knowing how a bookmaker works, managing emotions… It is definitive, following a solid betting strategy. It is necessary to have clear concepts such as valuebet , and its difference with the statistical probability that an event ends in a certain way.
Why are there so many?
Despite being such a complicated profession, it seems that tipsters grow like mushrooms, why?
The sources of income of a tipster can be three:
Their own sports bets : ideally a tipster follows their own tips. Who would trust him if he didn’t do it himself?
You have to be careful with this, though. Some bookmakers offer platforms for tipsters to create manipulated images, so they can show tickets and betting histories that they have not actually made.
Bookmaker affiliate commissions: Bookmakers pay some of these “analysts” for the money their fans lose on them. When this happens, the problem isn’t just that the tipster isn’t able to make you money, it’s that they don’t even want to.
A good tipster should be able to give you a forecast and tell you from what odds it is interesting. If a ‘pick’ is Bet on the X team in the YYY bookie… be suspicious.
The subscriptions of his followers: obviously, a tipster offers his tips in exchange for money. And in this world, cheap is expensive. It is better to follow an expensive, but reliable and verified tipster, than a sellout.
In the end, when you pay a tipster, you are paying who is going to be in charge of managing your money. Don’t you want to have the best?
