Fuck a Duck (nice way to start a new feature). But seriously, what a shit weekend. I don’t swear very often, but when I lose £420 gambling in a couple of days I think I’m due some leeway.

Let’s go back a month. I started tracking my bets again in an attempt to get Betting Kingdom back on the map. For those who don’t know, this website of mine has been around for 20 years.

I’ve been sharing tips, settling results, following tipsters for over 15 years. It’s what I do. I want to keep doing it.

Even more so having taken a recent job with a bookmaker and lasted 3 days after I couldn’t stomach the way they treated their customers differently depending on how much money they were losing.

Anyhow, here I am, not for the first time trying to create a tipster review site. My goal is simple. To find the best tipsters and share them with you.

As I did previously I dived in head first, following far too many tipsters without contemplating what could happen. When I soared to +40pts profit my approach appeared to be the correct one, but the weekend put pay to that.

I’m hoping this first entry into my diary will help punters avoid similar mistakes to me. Luckily it’s not proved costly. Only 2pts down right now, but imagine if I’d started last week. I’d had lost £400 in a few days.

My biggest mistake was following tipsters with little consideration for whether they would prove profitable or not. I was going to follow each tipster for 100 bets and then review them. I’ve scrapped that on the basis I may not have any money left.

A lot of the tips I’ve been following are by really good tipsters being paid to post content on third party websites. Tipsters like Mark O’Haire, Andy Holding, Jimmy the Punt, Tipster Wizard, Anthony Eadson, Jack Wright, Scott Thornton, the list goes on.

I’m not questioning their knowledge, there is a reason why these guys are being paid to provide content (tips), but the problem is they are forced to actively tip when there might not being any value on the table.

There is also the fact you rarely match their prices because so many other punters are following. These third party sites like SportingLife, Betting Odds, Betting Expert and Oddschecker also do a pretty poor job of displaying results.

Andy Holding was the turning point for me. Again, I’m not knocking Andy as a racing tipster. He clearly knows his stuff. But he’s paid to offer tips every day, lots of them. Plus the odds availability is poor.

I only followed Andy for 29 bets, 2 won. I lost £100 betting £5 per point. So I had to ask the question, should I keep following. I did some calculations and based on the profit/loss advertised on the oddschecker app, I came to the conclusion Andy’s ROI this year was around 7%. Decent.

But that’s at top price. Unless you are speedy gonzalez you ain’t getting that top price. Two of today’s tips, posted at 4.33 and 8.0 were available at 3.5 and 6.5. I came to conclusion at those odds I’d be losing money in the long run.

The same applies to a lot of these content producing tipsters. By the time you back their selections the value is gone and along with it, your ROI.

So my approach will be one of caution, following tipsters mainly working for themselves, a few third party tipsters like Ben Coley who I still believe will win me money, but mainly independent tipsters.

Hopefully this will see me make a profit in the long run but also help you find the best tipsters to follow.

I’m on the look out for tipster recommendations, or you are an independent tipster who want’s to be tracked and reviewed, get in touch.