With the onslaught of sports betting legalization, there has been an even bigger onslaught of sports betting “experts” and sports betting advice.
Every sports related site has now included at least a mention of betting information. This is quite a change from the unspoken taboo that sports gambling was. Back in the day, market leader ESPN.com would publish a daily line but you could not navigate to it. It was only accessible from a search engine results page or via typing in the URL directly. Fast forward to 2022 and many sites lead with sports betting information and sports betting advice.
But who is creating all of this gambling content? Did every sports reporter and enthusiast become a gambling expert overnight?
You may notice that here at Hawthorne Casino Insider we do not give out many sports betting picks. We love to tell you who we like and why, but ultimately we try to provide information, not advice. The reasoning is that we do not have an established track record of sports betting results. Everyone involved with this site has loved sports and gambling their whole lives, but that doesn’t qualify any of us as expert sports bettors. Our job is to tell you HOW to play, not WHO to play.
It really rubs us the wrong way when we see our horse racing brethren start telling the public how to bet on sports. At least show me a background in that sport or demonstrate an expertise before giving away or, even worse, selling sports picks. Back up your claims with numbers before becoming a tout. Follow the lead of former hockey star Eddie Olczyk or former baseball star Paul Lo Duca. They both cashed big time winning horse racing tickets and demonstrated expertise before leading the public.
The Paid Tout Scam
Before paying anyone for picks, it is a wise investment to research the track records of experts. You can never believe the crazy and unsubstantiated claims many touts publish. +80% winners, repeated 12-4 records in a weekend, a weekly “pick of the year”….no thanks.
It is especially dangerous to trust newsletters and individually pushed picks. For decades the mass marketers of picks have scammed thousands of punters with the same basic ploy. They find/buy a list of, say, 10,000 sales leads. Week 1 they give 5,000 people on the list their free “lock”, and the other 5,000 the other side of the same game. Regardless of the outcome, this leaves them with a list of 5,000 people who think they got the game right.
Next game, repeat the process of 2,500 on one side and 2,500 on the other. Then again with the 2,500 winners, and again with 1,250, then possibly again with the remaining 625. It’s a pure numbers game.
At some point the customers who were given 4 or 5 consecutive winning “locks” think the site is brilliant and are hard sold. Meanwhile, the scam site operators haven’t even had to flip a coin to convince these folks of their genius!
The Gambling Operator Scam
The next caveat is gambling content provided by operators.
Sports gambling creates a purely adversarial relationship between the operator and the gambler. Every dollar won by a gambler is lost by the operator. The operator has no real incentive other than provoking the players into making a bet. Why would they ever give valid sports betting advice?
Luckily, the big boys seem to play by the rules and their actual sites have little/no advice content. Fanduel, Draftkings, and PointsBet websites go straight to the numbers. But beware of the less than scrupulous sites that post opinions. You never know the motivation behind them. If they had valuable information about the most likely outcome of a game, would they share it with bettors?
Also beware of their social media posts with stories of big bets, big cashes, or line movements. The operator is not on your side. When they confide that “75% of tickets and 72% of money is on one team”, what are they trying to accomplish? Do they want you to fade that money? Maybe, and that lowers their exposure and risk.
The Benefit of a Sports Betting Advice Consolidator
There are a few sights out there where touts are tracked. The pickers who are associated with these sites have their results verified and documented. My favorite is Tallysight.com.
On Tallysight, sports gambling content creators join the sight to create, publish and monetize their sports betting content and expert picks. Tallysight verifies their identities and credentials before publishing their content and picks. Over time, each content creator/tout develops a verified track record which is available for public viewing.
For the gambler, Tallysight offers access to all of the experts’ consensus picks. They consolidate the selections from all of their experts and publish percentages for pretty much every game in every major sport. If you believe in the wisdom of crowds for sports betting, then this is your jam.
Tallysight is a great place to vet out handicappers you can trust before you utilize their advice ad possibly pay for their services. I would highly recommend their Twitter feed: @Tallysight.
The Sports Book is NOT Your Friend
When listening to the advice of others about a game, you must consider who benefits when you are wrong. THE SPORTS BOOK! Know who you are getting your sports betting advice from and make sure they care about the outcome of that game as much as you do. Remember, talk is cheap.
