How to beat the bookies!?

Finding out something before others do is one of the keys to successful sports betting. How do you know you’ve picked the right tip?

A low margin and a high betting limit are extremely important for a professional bettor, but perhaps even more important is to get the right type and quality of information in time. Those who are able to do this regularly stand a good chance of taking the fight to the bookmakers, and are the ones who become the professional bettors.

Getting valuable information in time does not mean you can pick a winning tip, but it can help you beat the bookmakers by beating the closing line.

What is a ‘closing line’?

Last available odds for the betting event. If a bettor can place a bet at a better odds than this number, he has beaten the bookmakers and placed a bet that has value and a good chance of winning. This is called a positive expected value bet.

Beating the closing line regularly is one of the hallmarks of a professional bettor.
Just gathering the information is no guarantee that you will make a winning bet, but it can help you place your bets at better values than the closing line. If you keep beating the bookmakers over the long term, you stand a good chance of making a profit.

What is not valuable information?

In a world of digitalisation, we now have many ways to access information. Official websites, sporting websites, fans’ forums or even the athletes’ own social networking sites can help us to get an insight into the current situation.

For example, if you come across a piece of news on a forum that a team has not been paid for two months and the players do not want to play in the match this weekend, this is information that changes the probability of the outcome of the match. This could be called valuable information, but let’s not forget it:

While the majority of tipsters may have a comprehensive knowledge of their preferred sport, when they give betting advice, it is in most cases a subjective opinion.

On the internet you can find tipsters with quite impressive statistics, which might lead you to assume that they know what they are doing, but if you do a little more research, it often turns out that a good deal of luck or a good streak is needed to be successful.

Not all winning bets are good bets

Unfortunately, most tips that are published are based on information that is available to everyone – including bookmakers.

It may be a trivial example, but if someone justifies a win for team A against team B by saying that they have a good chance based on the results against each other, this is not a bet based on valuable information, because in this case they are just using their subjective opinion to think that the odds are good, but in reality the bookmakers have got the numbers right.

All that said, your bet may still work, but with this style of bettor, you should evaluate your results correctly, as not all winning bets are good bets and not all losing bets are bad picks.

The difference between gossip and information

As mentioned above, in today’s digital world, it takes minimal effort to access information via the web or social networking sites. We live in an age where anyone can share or access valuable information and news at any time.

However, this freedom is also one of the biggest dangers, as it is very easy to fall for a few fake news and disinformation.
Many tipsters or tipsters try to attract attention to themselves by using catchy phrases in their analyses, presenting themselves as someone who bases their tips on absolutely unique information. In many cases, however, it turns out that his knowledge of the event in question is superficial and the information he has is not as valuable as he thought.

It is therefore extremely important to do your own research.
Professional sports bettors do not believe anything at first sight, they always check the veracity of the information and make sure it is true, and monitor the value of the tip.