This article follows on from yesterdays post about scammers. My advice to any punter looking to follow a tipster, free or paid, is to do some homework.

One of the likely reasons you might be interested in following a tipster is what they share on Social Media.

“10 WINNERS IN A ROW”

“100/1 WINNING ACCA”

It’s easy to be lured in.

Just remember if you sat down 100 people in a room with a coin to toss, it wouldn’t take long for one of them to throw heads 10 times on the spin!

Point being, given the huge number of tipsters these days polluting our Twitter feeds, several of them are always going to be on a winning streak.

So don’t dive in. Take you time, and follow these simple steps before you commit to following that tipster.

View their Profit/Loss Sheet

This is even more important for a paid service. In my opinion, every paid tipster should have a spreadsheet or tracking service displaying their stats.

There’s no excuse for it. Websites like bettin.gs make it quick and easy to track bets, or you can simply use google sheets.

Why would a tipster not track their results?

It’s either through laziness or because they are not making a decent profit and don’t want you to know about it. If it’s the latter then you definitely don’t want to sign up or follow their tips.

If it’s laziness, then ask yourself this question. How much research is that tipster doing if they can’t even be arsed to track their results? Not a lot is probably the answer.

If you can’t find a profit or loss sheet, simply ask. If they refuse to share that information then don’t follow them, regardless of how profitable they claim to be on Social Media.

Odds Availability

Try to factor in the likelihood that you will match the odds that the tipster promotes. I’ll do a deep dive into this later on. But factors like number of subscribers, the bookmakers they use, the markets they tip on and the time of their tips can all effect prices.

A tipster with a 10% ROI is no good to any punter if you cannot get the odds they promote. By the time you scoop up the lower odds, all the value is probably gone and you could end up losing money.

Reviews

There are some excellent tipster review sites on the internet. Check them out. See if the tipster you are interested in has been reviewed.

If they’re a decent tipster with a long history of consistent results then the chances are that somewhere online they’ve been reviewed, good or bad.

Just be wary, I’ve come across a few tipster review sites that only follow affiliate tipsters to try and generate some commission. Most are genuine but some may give a false impression of a tipster in the hope you’ll sign up via their website.

You could of course just follow the tipsters I have reviewed and build your portfolio that way.