“do you have any tips for today?”
“which horse is going to win today?”
These are questions I get asked on a daily basis.
You may be aware that I don’t give out horse racing tips.
There is a very good reason for that.
Have you ever met anybody who has made a consistently long-term profit over a period of years from horse racing tips?
Nope.
Me neither!
In this blog post, I’m going to unravel the reason that almost no bettors make a long-term profit from horse racing tips.
In the process of doing this, I hope that you see that on this route is only going to end up one way for you. And that is not a way which is going to see you profit, or find long-term success.
First thing I want to look at is when you join a tipping service…
“Racing Genius Reveals
Secret Horse Racing Tip Betting System That Makes £31,292“
Marketing.
It looks something like the headline above for most horse racing tipsters!
That’s the time most people join a new tipster service.
Very often, you would have even heard other horse racing tipsters until you see a piece of marketing material which is telling you how well they are performing.
Which is completely logical.
If we think about it, most horse racing bettors are looking for a quick win.
It’s this quick win that tipsters use to their advantage when they are marketing.
Again, this is fair enough. They will promote their service at the time when they think they can get the most customers.
There is nothing wrong with this.
We must be careful not to confuse a tipster who is marketing their recent results correctly and accurately, with the tipster who is making up their results to make them sound good.
These are two very different situations.
I am assuming for the rest of this blog post, that we are talking about a tipster who is marketing their recent results correctly.
He was held the marketing works:
1) The tipster is in a losing streak or downswing, no (or limited) marketing takes place
2) The tipster to get one or two winners, limited marketing begins
3) The tipster hits a winning streak, major marketing campaign starts
At first glance, this all looks as you would expect it. The tipster isn’t promoting their service very heavily while it is losing, when it starts winning, they begin promotion, and when they hit a winning streak they promote heavily.
That makes sense from a business perspective.
But, from a bettor’s perspective, this is a disaster.
And here’s why…
When a tipster knows that they are on a winning streak, it has already been two or three days at the very minimum before they realise it. It could possibly be even as long as one or two weeks.
That means, in a best case scenario, the tipster will begin promoting between 4 to 5 days after the winning streak has started. In a worst case scenario, the tipster will begin promoting 2 ½ to 3 weeks after the winning streak or started.
In betting, our journey is made up of winning streaks and losing streaks. The profit from the winning streak’s need to outweigh the losses from the losing streaks in order for us to make a long-term profit. But, we are always either in a winning streak or a losing streak of some sort.
By the time a tipster begins promoting their service on the back of a winning streak, that winning streak will already be coming to an end.
That’s why you may have found in the past, that every tipping service that you join, you always seem to join it and they start losing.
It’s because you are joining it on the back of a promotion which was sent towards the end of a winning streak, when it hits the realised they were on a winning streak.
The promotion looks great, because the recent results have been excellent.
But you join up, and if you’re lucky, you will get some of the profits from the end of the winning streak. However, as we all know, after a winning streak we get a losing streak.
As you can probably see… you are effectively joining at the beginning of a losing streak, if you join a text to service when they are promoting recent big wins and winning streaks.
After joining, we wonder what has happened and why the Texter has suddenly started losing. The truth is, they haven’t suddenly started losing. They have just come to the end of their winning streak, they are now going into their losing streak, and you have to ride that losing streak out first before you get to the next winning streak.
But most bettors never make it to the next winning streak. They are so disappointed in the results of the tipster in the short term, and they have so little confidence in the tipster, that they aren’t prepared to risk sitting through that losing streak to get a winning streak.
So… we cancel and move onto the next tips disservice who is promoting their current winning streak. Unfortunately, we now know, this is going to repeat itself because we’re going to move into a losing streak, we will cancel this service, and move into the next.
The bottom line is that we stop using the tipster service before we’ve ever really given it a chance to profit.
It’s All In The Mind!
Now that we’ve taken into account the fact that we are going to be joining the services at the worst possible time, we now need to think about the psychology behind why we never allow ourselves to win using them.
This psychology is critical to understanding why tipster services never work for the majority of punters.
If you have any questions on this, please let me know in the comments below.
There is an undeniable fact, the fact that nobody can get away from, a fact that destroys the chances of most bettors from ever making a profit.
The fact is that a 25%, 30%, 35%, or even a 40% strike rate is not good enough, and not high enough for most of us to be able to sustain a long term profit.
A 40% strike rate means losing streaks of 14, 15, 16, and even 17 consecutive losing bets in a row.
Let’s be honest, would you be truly comfortable to lose 17 consecutive bets in a row, and continue betting on the selections from a service that you have just joined?
I know I wouldn’t!
What about if we had 12 consecutive losing bets in a row and then had two or three winners, and I’ve had another eight consecutive losing bets in a row, with another winner, followed by yet another 10 or 11 consecutive losing bets in a row.
How would you feel then?
It will be pretty difficult to believe that the tipster was going to make you a long-term profit.
Of course, they may well be long-term profitable. The problem is actually not so much about whether a tipster is going to be profitable or not, the problem is that we are following selections that don’t suit our own personalities.
The most important thing in profitable betting on horse racing, is to have a strategy or selection process that is based around your own personal risk levels, time available, bankroll, and understanding, or expectation, of what you will achieve and what could happen. Particularly in relation to losing streaks.
This is what lets most horse racing bettors down.
Contrary to popular belief, it is not actually the selection process of finding profitable bets that is the hardest part of long-term winning. It is actually setting our expectations correctly to allow ourselves to win.
Here are the four points where most bettors go wrong…
1) They want to bet on comparatively high odds horses, odds of 5/1 or higher, but still win regularly. There is no deep understanding of the relationship between odds, strike rate and losing streaks.
2) There is no understanding, acceptance or comfort with the length of losing streaks that are going to happen.
3) Unrealistic expectations of a long-term return on investment.
4) Trying to generate more profit by staking larger stakes than the bankroll can support, and significantly increasing the chance of losing the entire bankroll.
Time and again I see bettors losing, when they should be winning, purely because one of these four things is happening.
And it makes me sad. Because I know they could be winning.
After a lot of research, lots of surveys, and a whole heap of testing, I’ve discovered the most bettors who are not yet profitable, need a strike rate over at least 60%, in order to keep the losing streaks at a level with which they are comfortable.
Yet, most will consider a minimum strike rate of 20% as acceptable, and anything above 30% as good.
Most bettors who are not profitable, want to place bets on horses at 5/1 and higher. However, in order to be profitable, they would be far better to focus on place markets or 80/20 bets, on horses with all the 5/1 or lower.
But they don’t feel that the returns are high enough for the effort put in.
Which is the fourth point above. When you consider your return, this must be based on a return on investment, and not on monetary profit. Because if I have a £100 bankroll, I may make a £5 profit in a month. That doesn’t make the strategy bad. It just means I have a small bankroll.
If I had a £10,000 bankroll instead, I would make £500 profit a month.
The monetary profit is directly related to the size of bankroll. It doesn’t determine whether the strategy is good or bad!
This ties directly into understanding losing streaks, and how they relate to strike rate.
With a strike rate of 40%, you could get it 15, 16 or even 17 consecutive losing bets. That means you need to bankroll at least 170 units.
That’s being conservative.
If you wanted to be very safe, you would have a bankroll of 340 units.
Being honest with yourself, if you had a strike rate of 40%, would you currently have bankroll of 340 units to use for it?
Why such a big bankroll?
Because it allows us to bet not just through the losing streaks, but also through the downswings. It allows us to do this, without ever having a concern for losing our bankroll.
When we don’t have a concern that we may lose our bankroll, then we free ourselves psychologically to stick with processes and strategies over weeks and months when they may not be performing very well.
These poor performances are often statistically normal, it is bettors who struggle with them. If we can stop ourselves struggling with them, and use the stats to guide our decisions, then we will begin to win long-term.
In summary…
over the last 20 years, I have yet to meet a single person who has managed to make a long term profit from horse racing using the selections of a tipster.
By long term, I mean at least 2 to 3 years consecutively.
Generally, joining a tipster service is a bad decision for most horse racing fans.
It begins with the time that you join, which is usually just before a downswing. Combined this with a lack of understanding of the losing streaks, the downswings, the bankroll requirements (here I mean the true bankroll requirements, not just what the tips do uses in their marketing, as that will always be lower than it should be), I long-term return on investment, and a realistic concept of what monetary profit Will be attainable from the bankroll available without risking the entire bankroll.
When you combine all these things, it becomes nearly impossible for anybody to make a profit long-term using a tipster service.
But it’s important to notice, that doesn’t mean the tipster won’t make a long-term profit. It means that bettors will stop using the tipster long before they ever get to see that profit.
I talk here from first hand experience. I’ve done this myself, many times in the past. Have you? Let me know in the comments.
The best horse racing tip in the world is…
Spend the time to understand yourself, your comfortable risk levels, your time available, and build a strategy that suits you, only then will you start to find long term success.
Hi Michael. This all makes sense and I would never pay for a tipping service. I think many of them are probably scams anyway. However, how do you feel about mainstream tipsters from the press? Their tips are free and the commentary associated with their tips can be helpful by highlighting things about selections that didn’t come to light during my analysis. Also their long term record is available for all to see and is independently verifiable on napchecker.com, for example.
Any additional information is good, as long as you trust their opinion to be accurate enough to add to your own consideration, or you’re going to go back and make your own assessment on that opinion to confirm.
Whilst the above is broadly true, particularly re the behaviour of most punters and their reaction to losing streaks, to say that there are no tipsters providing profitable tips is nonsense. I use several paid tipsters profitably, one of which has made me over £5000 to sub £20 stakes since 2016. (He is currently on a losing streak so good time to join.)
I wasn’t meaning to say no tipsters make a profit, they definitely do. Rather to say that, for most people, tips don’t work for them because the method of selection, risk involved, bankroll requirements, losing streaks and downswings etc. are not designed to suit them, and they’re not comfortable with them. That combined with not having confidence in the tipster makes it nearly impossible to make a long-term profit from them, even if the tipsters selections are actually long-term profitable 🙂
Hi Michael et al,
Ah, the problems of using a Speech-to-text app ??.
You really should proof read your submission before posting it.
Either that or take elocution lessons ???.
That aside, (and just imagine my problems with my broad Yorkshire accent), I think the problem is much simpler than that…
Most tipsters are simply crap and make their stats up as they are going along.
Let’s face it, most punters, at some point, fantasize about making a living, not just a “profit” from gambling.
As a result most punters, at some point, toy with the idea of paying for the “inside scoop”, be it a tipster, a system…
or a “unique” ratings service ???.
The tipsters know this, and therefore know there will always be a steady revenue stream from punters giving them a go.
My advice? Always get a free trial first, if they are as good as they claim the punters will make some money first, which they will reinvest with the service. (Big hint!!!)
Keep up the good work, and don’t forget the free trial…tipster.
Dandy
It was my first go at text-to-speech ? clearly my proof reading wasn’t up to scratch! I will go through it again. I think the problem with free trials is there is an expectation to have made a profit during the two to four weeks of the trial, and often that’s not possible, with strike rates of 30%, if you join at the beginning of a downswing, it could be as long as three months before you see a profit. By that time the free trial would be well finished.
You are so right Michael- Confidence in the tipster is paramount and 100% is the minimum. but confidence in yourself is more important- YOUR PLAN and YOUR BANK must be 100% set in stone. Punters should treat it as an investment – £1000 in your savings at 0.01 % – A plan with a 12% will give a few long losing runs of maybe 30 – at £10 a pop you are down £300 on a losing run.
The player must know this before the start and if they are not happy ( ie 100% Confident ) then leave your money in the savings – at 0.01%
Hi Michael
I’m a semi – pro tipster (in that I have a job but put tips up daily). I never , ever advertise and never will if people want to follow me ( or any of the other tipsters that post on The Tipster League) they are more than welcome.The League show you every tip that everyone has ever put up so there is no hiding a bad run.
But what you say is spot on , people join you during a good run then disappear when the winners dry up.
And I’ve often thought that they’re probably jumping onto the end of somebody else’s winning streak.
The tipsters on there charge between £5 and £50 / month but there is no long term commitment to commit to , you stay or go as you please and all our followers are anonymous
But if there was one thing that I would like to scream at the punters is pick your tipster and stick with them through the good and bad , be realistic , then hopefully in the long run you will make a profit.
wow you talk some real shite here lol
and this quote alone “With a strike rate of 40%, you could get it 15, 16 or even 17 consecutive losing bets”
is a load of bull
I’m hitting around this mark and just under and the longest losing run has been 8 and more often than not it’s less
Thank you for the message, it’s great to hear that you’ve only had a losing run of eight so far. I am not suggesting that every losing streak will be 15 or higher, but statistically, when you start getting to the long-term, around 2000 bets (i.e. a year’s worth of betting with five bets a day), you will likely hit a losing streak of 15 or more with a 40% strike rate.