Tipster 101: How to Avoid Bad Football Betting Tipsters

Following football betting tipsters is a punter’s favourite way to play smarter and minimise the risk when placing football bets. 

Football tipsters do what their name suggests, they use their sports knowledge and betting expertise to provide betting tips for football matches, on betting sites. Tipster services aren’t just limited to football, though, they are popular across a range of sports, especially horse racing and greyhound racing. 

While there are many genuine and professional football betting tipsters for you to follow, you don’t want to run the risk of being caught out by a bad tipster; you are betting your hard-earned cash after all. But how can you tell the good from the bad?

We’ve got some tips of our own to help you determine who is an honest football tipster, how to avoid being caught short by untrustworthy tipster services and what you should be aware of as a hopeful punter:

Avoid Social Media Tipsters

Social media is very much at the forefront of our lives, but it’s not advised to head to your favourite social media channel to hunt for free tipsters. Firstly, tipping on social media is hard to regulate, meaning anybody could be masked as a professional on Facebook or Twitter when in actual fact they have no knowledge in the world of betting – they could be there knowingly conning punters out of money.

It’s extremely easy to delete sports betting tips if they are unsuccessful, negative comments, users or reviews can be blocked and the ability to backdate tips are all a number of reasons why it becomes difficult to identify a trustworthy tipping social media site on the surface. 

Analyse Their Results History & Winning Streaks

If a tipster is genuinely good at what they do, professional and had great success with providing football betting tips, they won’t be afraid to back it up with proof and a legit tipping website will encourage them to do so. 

When a tipster claims to have a high success rate or ROI, you should be able to see the data to prove this to know if the so-called expert is trustworthy or not. Only use services that allow you to see the football  tipsters betting history, including information on:

• Previous bets
• The dates of the bets
• Match selections
• Betting odds
• The result of the match
• The outcome of the bet
• Profits won so far 
• Yield
• Strike rate 

All of this information will make it easier for you to calculate their win rate and the potential return on investment for your stake – even better if their win rate has been calculated for you by the online tipster service!

Is It Too Good to Be True?

As the saying goes, ‘if it looks too good to be true; it probably is.’ Of course, this is not always the case, some football tipsters are fantastic at what they do, but it does act as a gentle reminder to double or triple check the facts if something appears TOO good on the surface and pay close attention to the ‘success rate’ of overall sports tipping site, rather than one individual tipster. 

If a tipping service is advertising that almost all of their tipsters have won every bet over the last 12 months, or if they claim to have an extraordinarily high ROI every single year, it probably means they’re overexaggerating their success; which ties into our next point…

Does the Service Look Professional?

Although you can’t fully judge a book by its cover, the initial look and feel of a website can be a big telltale sign of how professional a website might be, as it serves as a good indicator into how much time, money and effort have been channelled into the website. 

Some indicators to look out for when scanning a tipping service website include:

• Good website design that is easy to navigate and provides a great user experience
• Do they have linked social media accounts 
• Have they provided an address and contact details such as phone numbers or emails
• Does the website look spammy?
  • Consistent popups 
  • Lots of affiliate links to other websites 
  • Too many advertisements 

Are They Selling Other People’s Tips?

It’s not uncommon for untrustworthy tipsters to recycle and reuse the tips provided by other tipsters who have taken the time to perfect their knowledge and skills. 

Although you might think, “if they’re copying from the best tipsters – does this really matter?” – the answer is yes, it does. Aside from being a dishonest act, the tips can’t be copied until after the original tipster has announced their tip and the copy is often extremely delayed and you will miss out on getting the first and highest available odds. 

Another worry of using copycat tipsters is what do they do when their chosen tipster is on a timeout? Will they make their own tips up even though they don’t have good betting or football knowledge, or will they choose to follow a cheap tipster who doesn’t have a great success rate. 

Here at KickOff, we have spent time developing a robust algorithm in an attempt to deter copycat tipsters and provide service users, tipsters and punters with the most reliable football tipping service. 

Unsolicited Mail? No Thank You.

Look out for companies who contact you unexpectedly claiming to be a legitimate and successful tipping service. If the company or service does catch your interest, make sure you follow the rest of our tips in this article to try and scope out if they are an honest and successful football betting tipster that you can trust with your money and betting decisions.

Try to Avoid Expensive, Long-Term Memberships

The only reason an untrustworthy, fake betting service would lie about their success rate is to win your custom and therefore take your money. It is usually these same websites that require one initial large payment to gain access to their tipsters or make you sign you up to a lengthy 12-month contract. 

If you were charged a small monthly fee with the ability to cancel, these dishonest websites wouldn’t make much money as it wouldn’t be before long that a tipster would realise their lying ways and cancel their membership without a second thought of returning. However, if you are hypnotised by their magnificent “success” and you fall into their trap of paying a large upfront payment that supposedly gives you a years access to the best tipsters on the betting markets, it makes no odds when you realise the website is a hoax as they already have your money. 

So, if a website is looking a bit too good to be true and they also expect a large lump sum upfront, we recommend doing a bit more research. 

Avoid ‘Inside Information’ or Match-Fixing Claims

One of the oldest tricks in the book for untrustworthy ‘tipsters’ is claiming they have inside information. This is usually followed by requesting a chunk of money from a hopeful punter with the promise of sharing this insider info and imparting other tips on match-fixing that will ‘guarantee a win’ for the unlucky bettor. 

This type of trickster is often found on social media (another reason to avoid social media tipping) and they will usually post their winning tips on Half Time/Full Time bets at very long odds. After a couple of publicly claimed tips, if you want access to what they claim to be their ‘full insider information,’ they will usually ask you to contact them privately, send them a fee and they will pass on their knowledge – but, of course, every punter will be a told a different and equally inaccurate nugget of insider information. 

Website Reviews Are Good – But Can All Be Trusted?…

Having reviews on a website is generally a positive sign, but don’t have your judgement clouded too much as some reviews can’t be trusted! 

This is especially frustrating as you might have spent time researching a tipping service and spent an hour or so scouring the internet for these so-called-honest reviews, only for them to turn out to be fake – and how can you spot fake reviews?

Bad football betting tipsters sometimes pay reviewers to leave them a glowing appraisal, so thinking about how the website earns money might shed some light on the matter. A lot of review websites earn revenue through partnerships, sponsorships and advertisements. If the website contains little to no genuine advertisement, they could be earning their revenue by being paid for false reviews.

You might also see a review that appears to be positive, but where the results of the tip were actually negative – this is another warning sign that a tipster review might be a fake. But the best hint of all for spotting fake reviews is via the website link provided.

Most reviews will contain a link to the tipping website that is being reviewed. If the website forwards to the standard website address, for example, www.kickoff.co.uk, this is fine. However, if the website address contains a long addition of numbers after the URL or a mixture of numbers and letters, this means the link is most probably an affiliate link and it is either a paid placement or the reviewer will earn a commission from every sign up that happens through clicking that link.

There are some amazing and knowledgeable football tipsters out there for you to follow, you just need to have confidence in the tipping service that you are using. 

At KickOff, we calculate our odds in real-time and bring you algorithmic predictions that improve your chances of winning. 

If you sign-up and register to a KickOff Pro account, you will have full access to the best tipsters, predictions and statistics to be like a professional – including a lengthy overview of all of our tipster’s betting histories, data, statistics and success rates.

You can build your bet by copying our most successful punters in just a few clicks; when they win, you win too – why would you go elsewhere?!