A Guide to Understanding Betting Tips and Companies

Bookmakers, betting markets, etc.

So perhaps the most obvious strategy in football betting tips today is to find out about the teams, players and runners, before chucking any of your hard earned cash after them.

As there’s a plethora of sports to follow, this strategy will most likely involve genning up on just the one and becoming an expert.

It’s said that it takes at least 10,000 hours before you’re an expert in anything, and betting is no exception. But how do you find the time to do this kind of work and know your market inside out?

The answer is, you get others to do it for you. The marvellous internet has made so much possible – including a world of betting predictions – at your fingertips.

Be Careful Who – or What – You Trust

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First up, making sure that everything’s above board is essential and the very first requirement for everyone.

A quick internet search will reveal plenty of sites providing betting tips on where to wager, but don’t just take them as read.

While backstreet rogue traders were yesterday’s problem (albeit not exclusively a thing of the past), today’s is internet scams and unreputable webpages popping up. Plus many sites will have an obvious ulterior motive – so be sure to check their credentials when it comes to advice.

There’s plenty you can do to make sure that the betting companies you’re using are above board.

First ask some questions: What’s their reputation? A good site will enable you to look at prior tips with consequent results. What’s in it for them? Are they trying to steer you toward specific bets for a subjective purpose? Seek out online reviews and recommendations (taking into account that even the best services always get some moaners reviewing too).

Be careful of bias and inaccuracies too, especially round players. Investigate the information you’re consuming to ensure it correlates with other sources.

Sign up to several companies’ newsletters and websites, and follow a wide variety, so that your tips are balanced. Also be wary of your own biases and preferences, they won’t serve you here.

Keep objective and don’t be prone to any false baits thrown your way.

Types of Tip

Look out for tips under different categories, such as banker tips. These are highly likely to come through, but the downside is that the odds are not so lucrative, so you won’t stand to make as much.

Some tips are listed as bullet points with a proposed likelihood of coming good. Others are written longhand, giving some background to the team, players and history and explaining in more detail, with as near as possible to ‘evidence’, why the tipster is backing the bet.

This can be a great way to increase your own knowledge at the same time, and you can cross check what they’re saying.

You’ll often find tips listed with a confidence level, presented in the form of a percentage. These may be calculated in a variety of ways (and be aware that none of these provide any kind of scientific guarantees, they should only ever be used as a guidepost).

Bring on the Maths

A formula can be used to add up all the win and each way tips for the selection and divide that by the total number of win and each way tips on that market.

You can also use one of the online calculators available on many sites to work out what this means for the confidence interval.

This is where betting gets really mathematical: the football betting predictions in tips are provided as a single figure percentage, but in reality, the likelihood of a wager coming good lies within a percentage range – whether that be large or small.

This size of this range will often be based on the amount of data available and so the more information there is, the more accurate that percentage will be – and the smaller the range.

Calculators enable you to input all the information you have, to essentially calculate the percentage of the betting tip percentage being on the nose. There’s some betting tips football meta right there.

Beware of Common Generic Methods

It’s not just what you bet on that counts, but counting what you bet. There are lots of sites offering simple and standard systems, much easier to follow for those who don’t want to put in so much research time on football betting tips.

Some suggest you bet your full bankroll every time, a fixed amount, a set percentage of your bankroll (which will fluctuate, unlike the fixed amount), or opt for the exotically named Fibonacci or Martingale methods, both of which involve increasing your wager after a loss.

But beware of these kind of easy strategies, as often they only work in the short-term and can end up costing you significantly more than they make.

In the end there are no shortcuts other than luck – which is the best shortcut of them all. Put in the time, selectively take some free football betting tips and work your way to some expert knowledge.

On our pages you will find information about the best online bookmakersbetting tipsmatch previews, a glossary, etc. More than 50 sports betting strategies will help you to find your own betting style. We offer our own live football results service for online betting, where all current football matches can be followed online.