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There are two different types of people who make a living off gambling: those who actually get dirty and place bets and those who tell you how to get rich off gambling. Any time you meet someone from the second category, you should proceed with great caution.
Those who tell you how to get rich gambling find it easier to tell YOU how rather than to do it themselves. They might sell books or, in our case, offer to sell horse racing tips. Not all horse racing tip services are scams, but there are lots of scammers who pose as tipsters. Always default to the position of skepticism when you meet a horse racing tipster who wants your money.
You have to wonder why someone would sell winning tips to the general public (and risk hurting his payout) rather than quietly make a fortune on his own. Sure, the tipster might just want a more reliable income stream, but it’s still something you should keep in mind when considering paying for someone else’s tips.
There Are Some Legitimate Tipsters Out There
The majority of tipping services are scams, but there are a few good ones out there. The good ones are hard to find, though. When someone finds a winning tipster, he’s not likely to go around sharing that information with the world.
If you see a tipster that looks legit, do a little research. Run a Google search on the name of the service and see if there are any honest reviews. Look for the name of the person behind the service and see what you can dig up on him. Ideally, a search for the name of the tipster should show you that it’s a real person and not just some pseudonym.
You can also test the service yourself, but this is not a straightforward process. Even the best tipping services get it wrong sometimes. They aren’t out to pick winners; they’re out to find value. If you join a service for a couple weeks and lose your first two bets with that company, it doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t know anything. It might just be normal variance.
It would be great to give you a firm answer to the original question, but it’s just not that simple. There are a lot of scammers out there and they muddy the waters with their misinformation, cheap tactics and constant name-changes. Always proceed with caution.
The Most Common Tip Service Scam
The most common scam for self-proclaimed horse racing tipsters is to give you a free trial and send you a few tips that actually do come through. You think it’s legit, give them a shot and then realize later that they don’t know anything.
This scam works by simply sending out batches of tips to different free trial members. If a scam tipping service has a list of 10,000 e-mail addresses, it might send 4 different picks to groups of 2500. The 7500 people who receive losing tips are never heard from again. The 2500 who get the right tip are then broken down to even smaller groups that each receive one more pick.
This might weed the whole list down to 625 potential buyers. If just 100 of those people sign up, it’s considered a win for the scammer. He can repeat this process as often as he wants under different names. Once the scammer has the process down, it’s an easy way to rip off a lot of people.
My Opinion
Weeding through horse racing tip services is such a headache that it’s not worth the trouble. If I came across something that seemed legit, I might give them a shot, but I’m not going out of my way to search for any.
You also have to remember that the money you pay to tipsters cuts into your bottom line. You need to see a significantly higher win rate with a tipping service than what you would need to profit on your own.
Plus, there are plenty of legitimate horse betting writers out there who give their analyses out for free. They might not deliver a “guaranteed 4 tips a week,” but they do provide useful insight and show you how to think and analyze races like a winner.
Besides, it’s so much more rewarding to do your own work and pick a winner. Horse racing handicapping is a skill that anyone can learn if they want to badly enough. It’s not easy, but it’s more fun to study horses than it is to weed through hundreds of scammers in search of that rare diamond in the rough.
