Handicapping and Tipping Sites

Handicapping is the work of forming your own opinion on a game and comparing it with the price a bookmaker is offering. Skill affects how well you do it, but it does not make the outcome of a match predictable, and most people who bet lose money over time. This page is about how handicapping and the tipster market work, not about turning either into an income. Research, judgement and bankroll management are what you control; the prices and the results are not, and over a season the margin the bookmaker builds into its prices applies to you whatever you do.

In the old days, learning how to bet on sports was a monumental task. You either had to be lucky enough to know a real sharp or you had to learn it on your own. There is now a great deal of handicapping material available for free. There are countless websites dedicated to the art of handicapping and making picks. Some of these sites are free to all while others only grant access to those willing to pay.

Just look around a little and you’ll find handicapping and picks sites dedicated to every sport under the sun. There are handicapping advice sites for horse racing, football, basketball, rugby, soccer, tennis and more. It is no longer necessary that you learn things the hard way. There are a lot of people out there who are willing to share their secrets with the world at large.

Free Handicapping Advice

Not ready to pay for picks? That’s no problem. There are all kinds of free informational sites out there that cover everything from the basics of betting to advanced handicapping strategy.

Free handicapping discussion exists in plenty of places, and the useful ones have the same characteristics: people post their reasoning before the game rather than their results afterwards, and disagreement is normal. We are not naming specific forums here — the ones worth reading change, and a recommendation on a page like this outlives the thing it recommended.

Sports handicapping forums are useful because you’ll often find people willing to share tips and strategy that you would never see published at a normal website. The thing you’ll have to watch out for with discussion forums is unqualified people giving out advice. Anyone can sign up for an account and talk a big game. You’ll have to spend a little time following the discussions to figure out who’s legit and who’s blowing smoke.

Paid Picks and Tipster Services

Paid picks websites are very hit or miss. Some tipsters (or touts) are very good at what they do and share their information with anyone willing to pay. These are bettors who sell their picks rather than, or as well as, betting them. You have to be careful though, because there are a lot of bad sports betting touts out there.

It requires very little know-how to set up a website, fudge up a winning bet record and start selling advice. It’s a business that attracts plenty of less-than-savory types who are more than happy to push the promise of easy money. All you have to do is pay a one-time fee, they say, and then you’ll be making money on autopilot.

The abundance of non-legit sports betting tips sites makes it difficult to do proper research. Just because someone publishes a winning record doesn’t mean much if you don’t know the person behind the website. It could be literally anyone.

Your best bet is to talk with knowledgeable industry people and ask around about specific touts. The odds are that someone out there knows what that tout is all about. Check a few reviews and see if the picks site delivers on its promises and is actually backed by legitimate handicappers.

Even with legitimate touts, the price of the service has to be weighed against what you actually stake. A season-long package can cost more than a small-stakes bettor could win back from it even if every pick were good, which is the calculation to do before the one about whether the picks are any good.

This leads into another point: touts are not perfect. Even a seller who is genuinely good loses a great many individual bets, because the edges involved are small — which means a bad run tells you very little about whether a service is any good, and so does a good one.

This makes it even more difficult to sort the good from the bad. If you try a paid handicapping service and don’t have a winning season, it’s either a result of natural variance or because the handicapper doesn’t know what he’s doing. Hopefully your tout provides sensible reasoning for each pick, but even that’s not enough to determine if your service truly is run by experts.

The same also applies to the reverse. If your handicapper delivers on a week of picks, is it because he’s good or because he got lucky? I’ve even heard of some touts delivering opposing picks to 50% of their e-mail lists. Then he follows up with the half who received the winning pick to hit them up for a paid subscription. It’s crazy out there.

The point of all this isn’t to completely talk you out of paying for picks. Some sellers are no doubt better than others. I just want to make sure I dispel any notion that paying for picks is akin to guaranteed cash.

What to Look for If You Do Pay for Picks

If you are going to buy picks, the things worth checking are the same wherever you buy them. Does the seller publish a full record rather than a selected one, covering losing periods as well as winning ones? Is the record long enough to mean anything — a strong month is not evidence of anything at all? Does each pick come with reasoning you can evaluate, rather than just a selection? And does the cost of the service make sense against what you actually stake, which for most people is the answer on its own.

We do not name a service here. Prices, packages and refund terms change without notice, a recommendation on a page like this outlives the thing it recommends, and we have no way to verify a seller's record independently — which is the same standard we apply to the touts this page warns about.