It’s hard to find proven long-term tipsters. Let’s go into detail on some of the common traits of successful sports bettors. If you are a tipster or want to become one, after reviewing this list, you might decide to work on some of these areas in an attempt to be more like them. By fine-tuning some of these skills yourself, you might be able to become a more successful sports bettor. Also, you’ll be able to evaluate which tipster to follow on your betting journey.

1. Strong math skills and focus on value (not game winner)

Betting on sports involves a lon of numbers. From historical performance data to bookmaker odds, there are lots of numbers to look at and analyze. If you’re not good at math, it can be tough to understand what all of these numbers mean to you and your sports betting wagers. Successful sports bettors tend to have very strong math skills, especially in probability theory. Using this skill set, they are able to quickly understand what the data they have access to means. Often, these types of bettors will then crunch some serious numbers to help them determine odds (probabilities) for each outcome. Confronting these calculations with odds offered by the bookies will extract VALUE. And that’s what professional betting is all about, where amateurs tend to focus solely on who’s going to win (ignoring probabilities all together).

2. Expert knowledge of sport/league

This common trait of sports bettors should be obvious – in order to be successful, sports bettors need to have a solid knowledge of particular sport, or even particular league. Without this trait, it is honestly near impossible to become good at sports betting.

Having a good knowledge of sport in hand allows successful sports bettors to understand better things that might impact their wagers. Using their knowledge of sports, these successful bettors have a good understanding of the many different things that can impact the outcome of sporting events. This allows them the chance to make better-educated wagers than someone that is not as knowledgeable about sports. A recreational sports bettor will often just look at a handful of factors, such as which team is favored, when making their betting decision. Even though there is much more information that could be evaluated, your average sports bettor tends to stop right there. While basic stats are great, these bettors go much deeper in an attempt to evaluate all game factors.

3. Transparent and stable long-term strategy

Something else that successful sports bettors do well is manage their money, and transparent and consistent strategy is the clear sign of such trait. Without excellent money management skills, it’s hard to make a long and successful run in sports betting. If you end up betting too much of your bankroll on single games, it could be detrimental to your bankroll balance. This is a common mistake that recreational bettors make, wetter they use uneven staking, chase losses or simply have to high stakes (in terms of percentage of total bankroll). A successful sports bettor will have established strict money management guidelines for themselves, and they will stick to these no matter what. These money management lines will determine how much of their total bankroll will be placed on each wager. Instead of swinging for the fence on each bet, the goal of a successful sports bettor will be to make money over the long haul. That said, volume of bets is equally important – betting on just a couple of picks per week would take forever to make significant winnings.

4. Viable market and bookmaker

Another common trait of successful sports bettors is that they viable betting market, meaning high betting odds. Without high stakes, high return is impossible – you should rather buy a lottery ticket. Also, bookmaker selection is important as well, where winners must be welcome and high limits offered. Line shopping is another option since it allows you to get the maximum value from your winning wager.

5. Bonus: how to evaluate tipster through statistic

With all factors explained, let’s see how to apply this in practice to evaluate tipsters (or your personal) betting result. Here’s the process in several steps:

Check if tipster is an expert in particular league and does hi place picks on viable markets and sustainable bookies List all the picks and "normalize" them (only date, odds and W/L data is required, since will simulate flat staking). Example, tipster has 100 picks in the period of 4 months Calculate ROI as sum of all winning odds divided by total number of picks, minus 1. In our example let’s say winning odds sum up to 115. ROI is  115/100 – 1 = 15% Calculate ROC – return on capital. This measure is more important than ROI since integrates time and bankroll components. Therefore we need another measure – bankroll in stakes. For example, if you 5% of your bankroll in flat staking strategy, this is ROC20. Similarly, for 2% flat staking we’d have ROC50. ROC is calculated as Profit/Bankroll, in our example ROC20 is 15/20=75%, and ROC50 = 15/50 = 30% (in 4 months period!). Meaning that if you’ve followed this tipster with 1000 USD bankroll, you’d earn 750 USD in 4 months (in ROC20 strategy) Viability check – playing as aggressive as ROC20 is, it’s important to check if tipster greatest fallback ever reached -20 (or -50) stakes. If so, this strategy would not be viable since all the money (bankroll) would be lost in one point in time

That’s it for now, please feel free to post your questions or comments to further elaborate any of the statements or calculations and bring more value and clarity to all Blogabet members!