Whose Sports Betting Advice Should You Trust?

Sports Betting

Online sports betting has become about as popular as the sports they sponsor and encourage people to bet on. But even before this recent explosion, sports betting analysts, experts, and touts have been around peddling “expert” advice to any person they can catch.

From betting on the biggest basketball or football games to the most lucrative horse racing betting, you will find websites, magazines, and podcasts dedicated to predicting the winners for the latest sporting events.

But with so many of them around, especially with social media, it can be difficult to filter out the good betting advice from the nonsense. Or maybe they are all hogwash? Maybe it’s better to stick to your own guns?

Still, getting into sports betting or even just analyzing sports means having to do research from a number of these sources. Let’s look at four types of sources of sports betting advice and why you should or shouldn’t trust them.

The Touts

A sports betting tout is a person, usually a professional sports bettor or handicapper who sells their picks. You pay these touts money up front in exchange for them telling you who or what to bet on.

  • Why You May Trust Them

Touts can have a bad rep, but there are ways to verify how trustworthy they are. The first is to check if their sports betting record is legitimate through a third-party tracker.

Anyone can claim they have a winning record, but a verified record separates the amateurs from the wannabes. And generally speaking, touts put their money where their mouth is so you can assume they are breaking down sports games more intensively than your average sports bettor.

  • Why You May Not

Many of them have a bad rep for a reason. They can lie, exaggerate their claims, and flat out be trying to rip you off. A tout isn’t just trying to win bets, they’re looking to fill their pockets with your cash.

The Sports Analyst

Every professional sport has its set of analysts. They can range from the well-dressed folk you see on TV or the voices you hear on a podcast or the writers you read on a website. Their goals are the same: to figure out how an upcoming sports event will play out.

  • Why You May Trust Them

Unlike touts, these analysts are not out to charge you for their predictions. But like touts, they can spend a great deal of time studying the upcoming game or event. These persons can be professional or amateur.

Many of the professional analysts also used to be former players or athletes thus giving them an insight that the average fan doesn’t.

  • Why You May Not

Analysts may be great at breaking down how a game may go or how an athlete will perform, but they lack the betting insight that touts or sports bettors have. After all, many analysts are not bettors and approach the game simply from a picks perspective.

The Sports Analyst

A Predictive Sports Betting Model 

Sports betting models are algorithms designed to predict the outcome of sports games. These models are created via machine learning: scraping all kinds of numbers and quantifiable stats and creating formulas from it.

  • Why You May Trust Them

Even the best human thinkers are no match for the computing power of a machine. That’s the cold hard truth. The biggest edge machines get, outside of having unlimited computing power, is that they are also less prone to biases and blindspots as humans.

  • Why You May Not

These algorithms or models are still designed by humans thus some may contain the biases and shortsightedness of their creators.

There are many different predictive models out there and no, it’s not a one size fits all. Be sure to check out the accuracy of these models and to verify if their bets are also tracked.

Your Own 

Why not just go with your own gut? While most casual bettors do end up losing more than they win, some of the best bettors started out as fans. Just like you.

  • Why You May Trust Yourself

The beauty with us humans is that we all have a unique way of perceiving things. While sports is ultimately a zero sum game, you may be able to find insights that only you can uncover.

You also don’t have to worry about your own motives nor do you have to rip yourself off unless you’re some kind of masochist.

  • Why You May Not

You can’t think or see everything and most fatally, you can be oblivious to your own biases. At the end of the day, it’s your own decision on who or what to bet on or if you’ll even bet to begin with. Track your bets, review your history, and learn as you go.


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