Making the most of online resources for your betting

As is the case with lots of things in life, successful sports betting is somewhere between being a science and an art.

A science in the sense that there are some elements of it that you should execute without straying away from the golden rules. Such as having multiple betting accounts that allow you to always get the best price or only ever gambling at safe betting sites.

An art in that betting value should always be at the heart of all your wagering or that you avoid the most common errors when doing so. These two are less black-and-white and require using your experience and your own criteria along the way.

But what’s the deal when it comes to researching your bets? Which sites can be trusted to providing you with priceless snippets of information? How do you know a good tipster from a rogue one? What data is crucial to your long-term betting success?

Let’s look at the use of websites, social media accounts, tipsters and their content in terms of what they can do to help you.

General stats-based websites

There’s that old saying: ‘there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics”.

If you wanted to make a case for placing a particular bet, you can always find statistics that would back up your decision and justify your bet on the grounds that the numbers can point to it being a good one…if you so wished.

But of course, the more experienced punters see things differently.

Rather than deciding what to bet on in advance and then backing it up with stats, they let the stats themselves do the talking: it’s the stats themselves that point to the bet rather than being a rug of comfort to cling onto.

And that’s where stats-based websites come into play.

Let’s say Chelsea are playing Arsenal with Arsenal as the favourites going into it. Rather than deciding in advance what your bet is, a better plan is to forget about the odds to begin with and start studying the stats.

A site specialising in football stats will provide you with the head-to-head record between the sides, recent and long-term form and in some cases, other priceless data such as expected goals.

Expected Goals (xG) in football

According to the website https://understat.com/, the definition of expected goals (xG) is as follows:

“Expected goals (xG) is the new revolutionary football metric, which allows you to evaluate team and player performance.

In a low-scoring game such as football, final match score does not provide a clear picture of performance.

This is why more and more sports analytics turn to the advanced models like xG, which is a statistical measure of the quality of chances created and conceded.”

In other words, it evaluates how many goals on average a team should have been scoring and conceding in their past few matches based on an evaluation not just on the number of chances that were created by them and against them but the type of chances.

Let’s say Chelsea played West Ham the week before and the game ended 0-0. During the game Chelsea created three-clear cut chances with players one-on-one with the keeper and had a further two free-kicks very close to goal, both of which forced good saves from the West Ham keeper.

Based on so many good opportunities, their xG might be 2.0: they would have normally expected to have scored 2.0 goals in that match had their players not fluffed their lines or had the West Ham keeper not made some fine saves.

West Ham on the other hand only had three shots the whole match, two of which were long-range efforts that were off target, whereas the third was on target but was also from way out with little chance of leading to a goal.

So West Ham’s xG for the match might have been just 0.3.

Always about betting value

So even though the match finished 0-0, the xG of both sides strongly suggests that if anyone was to have won the game, it should have been Chelsea.

The experienced punter will include XGs from recent matches into their thinking along with all the other factors worth considering and which will also be readily available on a good stats-based website.

Once they’ve considered them all, they’ll come up with their own odds and compare to them to the odds currently on offer.

Maybe Chelsea are on an indifferent run of form as per actual results but other metrics such as xG or possession suggest they’ve actually been a bit unlucky and that with a little more fortune they may have won a fair few more of their recent games.

If their recent head-to-head record against Arsenal is pretty even and all in all there isn’t much to choose between the sides, then maybe the stats point to them being underrated in the betting market and a bigger price than they should be. Meaning Chelsea represent a good value bet.

Using stats in other sports

The above example relates to football but there will be similar versions of these sites available for other sports such as tennis, cricket or golf.

Take tennis. Player X may not be winning many games recently but the stats on a tennis-focussed site may show that he’s creating lots of break points, which for whatever reason, he just isn’t converting. As a considerable outsider against Player Y, he may have a better chance than the odds suggest if only he starts converting a few more of those break points.

Same with golf. Golfer G may not be having great results of late, but the stats may show that he’s creating lots of birdie chances, only to be missing very makeable putts. The stats suggest that his game in general may be in better shape than a golfer who is struggling to find the green but makes a few miraculous putts per round to get them out of trouble.

Social media often has a poor reputation within the sporting world and sometimes it’s justified.

The last few years have seen plenty of examples of ‘fake news’, online bullying, and disgruntled fans expressing their displeasure in unsavoury ways just because someone missed a penalty or dropped a catch.

But it can also be a priceless asset when it comes to betting.

One of the great positives about it is that it’s in real-time.

An injury to a key player in the warmup of a big football game will be reported on say Twitter within a minute or so of it happening, whereas it may take 5-10 minutes for a website like the BBC or Sky Sports to report it.

After all, writers at these sites will need a few minutes to put a story together, have it edited, and add an image before publishing it, by which time maybe you’ve missed the boat in terms of making use of that information for betting purposes.

It’s perhaps an even greater asset in sports like cricket where an insight into the wicket and conditions on the day are worth their weight in gold.

TV commentators and journalists at the ground will have a far better understanding of the conditions than anyone sitting at home in front of the TV.

If they tell you in ‘real-time’ that the wicket is a belter and perfect for batting before the bookies realise it, the smart move is to go big on first innings runs. Assuming of course that other factors point to that, as well.

If they tell you that there’s likely to be lots of dew on the outfield during the second innings because there are already signs of it in the first innings, then it suggests that batting second will be easier as bowlers and fielders struggle with damp conditions in the second half of the match.

So, the bet based on that info is to back the side chasing as they’ll have the better of the conditions.

In these sorts of circumstances, it’s imperative to act quickly.

Sooner or later the bookies will have all this knowledge as well and will adjust their prices accordingly; getting this info and taking advantage of it as quickly as possible is of paramount importance.

Of course, some sources are far more reliable than others. The last thing you want to be doing is placing a poor bet based on fake news or inaccurate information, even without any malice behind it.

Obvious as it sounds, you’ll have to decide for yourself who can be trusted and who can’t.

But as a rule of thumb, established and well-respected journalists and TV commentators can generally be trusted. They’re highly unlikely to have any hidden agendas, they’re in the best possible position to have access to this info and they have their professional reputations to think about.

They won’t stay very long in well-paid, high-profile jobs if their Twitter or Instagram accounts are full of posts that later prove to be off the mark.

Tipsters- The good, the bad and the ugly

There’s nothing wrong with showing a profit in the long term purely based on successfully following one or more winning tipsters rather than deciding on all bets struck ourself. The key of course is knowing which bets to strike.

Just like many people are happy to trust their savings with financial advisors or bank managers who are better positioned than you to make good decisions about how to invest your money, so tipsters with all the time in the world on their hands, alongside years of experience in the job, may have a better insight into what is or isn’t a good bet.

But gone are the days when tipping on sports was limited to the Racing Post or the small betting section of your daily newspaper.

The advent of the internet means that absolutely anyone can become a ‘tipster’ as long as you have a social media account or a run-of-the-mill blog.

But just as per above, there are tipsters and then there are tipsters. They generally come under two categories.

Free Tips

There are hundreds of websites out there offering free tips on any number of sports.

The first bit of good news is just that: they’re free!

Tipsters at sites like the Racing Post have a reputation to uphold as arguably the greatest authority on betting-related matters in the UK so it follows that the tipsters that they hire to write for them are seasoned pros with excellent knowledge of the sport in question and a proven track record.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that year after year they turn over hundreds of points worth of profits.

All tipsters go through good and bad periods and sometimes you need to be a little patient and realise it’s worth playing the long game and sticking with that tipster: the profits will eventually come.

But whether they’re in the middle of a good or bad run, you can at least be confident that they know what they’re doing. Or else they wouldn’t be there in the first place!

So why are successful, winning tipsters giving away their tips for free? The answer is they make their money from these tips in an indirect way: either by having adverts on their website or by following the affiliate model and hoping readers sign up to external betting sites after reading their content.

By the way, here at Punters Pub we have a regular supply of betting tips, mainly for football, but for other sports as well. So check them out.