Reporting from Bet Chat HQ, north London…
It’s an age-old retort from disgruntled/mischievous tipster service members…
“These results have been so bad, why don’t we just lay them to make money?”
…but could this actually be a valid and potentially lucrative way to profit from sports betting?
After all, there are lots of potential benefits, including these two big ones…
Benefit number 1: Lay betting is only available via betting exchanges, therefore there is no chance of getting banned or restricted for making too much money. As with traditional back betting, the winnings are also tax free.
Benefit number 2: There are undoubtedly more bad tipster services out there (especially the free ones) than good so, in theory, finding the right services to follow should be relatively easy.
I must admit, it’s something that I’ve not put a huge amount of thought into before as here at the Bet Chat we obviously deal solely in services with profitable long-term track records, but the idea was brought to the front of my mind again by friend of Bet Chat Steve Wallis recently and I think it could have legs.
Here’s what I’m proposing…
Now, obviously we need some parameters here, so I’m proposing two key qualifying points for selections:
- I’m not interested in laying at big odds. This requires a large starting bank and is a recipe for trouble at the best of times. A big odds service can also have long losing runs and still be profitable overall, so it’s a tricky one to judge. Therefore, I want to focus on tipster services that tip short prices with average odds of around 3/1 or lower.
- It needs to be a service that has been running for a decent amount of time (a newbie getting off to a losing start is neither here nor there).
In my mind, the ideal candidate would be as follows:
- A free social media tipster with tens of thousands of followers. Loads of followers isn’t necessarily a sign of quality, especially with a free service (why are they not charging if it’s that good?). What it likely means is that the tipster makes a lot of noise when they do get a winner and dissenters after losing bets are drowned out.
- A tipster that excessively celebrates winners, especially short priced ones. You know who I mean… the BOOM types!
- A tipster that spends just as much time advertising links to bookie sign up offers as they do sending out tips. Most (but not all) bookie affiliate deals involve the referrer receiving a cut of the referee’s losses. This means that, whether they consciously or subconsciously act on it or not, these tipsters are incentivised to have a losing track record.
This is where you come in
The question now is: where do we go from here?
Well, what I’d like to do is create a free community group to run this experiment and see how we get on but, before jumping into that, I need suggestions for which services to follow and that’s where you come in. The question to you, therefore, is a simple one…
What are the worst (ideally free) short odds services you’ve ever followed, and why were they so bad?
Please send your responses to clients@thebetchat.com and, with a bit of luck, we can start performing the modern day equivalent of turning water into wine!
