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Sports Betting Touts, Tipsters, and Pick Services

If you’ve ended up on this page, the odds are that you’re searching for information relating to sports betting touts, tipsters, and pick services.

We’ve packed this resource guide full of information relating to all three.

Below, you’ll find out what they are, how they work, what you should look for, and tips on how you can stay safe when using them.

Now, let’s jump into it!

What Are Sports Betting Touts, Tipsters, and Pick Services?

Sports betting touts, tipsters, and pick services are all handicappers. Their goal at the end of the day is to sell their handicapping information and tips to end-users like you. Ultimately, they are in the business of selling picks and betting insights.

Below, we’ll break down each of these handicappers a bit more in detail so that you have a better understanding of who they are and how they operate.

Touts and Tipsters

A tout or tipster is an individual that gives away their picks on sporting events in exchange for payment. Tipster and tout are used interchangeably in many places. Which name is used often depends on the region that you live in.

The word “tout” is thought to originate from the term “touting,” which is defined as a polite way to brag. In essence, a tout is a person that thinks their picks are so good that they can charge others for that information.

In theory, the goal of a tout is to sell you pick information
so that you can make money with your sports wagers.

In rare cases, a tout or tipster might offer their picks and services for free. We’ve seen some cases where touts and tipsters might offer the first tip or two for free as a way to attract new clients. However, this is not too common. For the most part, you’re going to have to pay if you want their picks.

With touts and tipsters, you’ll often pay a flat fee for the pick. As well, many of them also charge you a percentage of your winnings if they are correct. What stinks is that the tout or tipster still keeps their flat fee even if their pick was incorrect.

Be sure to have a full understanding of the fees charged before agreeing to work with one of these handicappers.

In many cases, touts and tipsters are not very good at what they do. The vast majority of these handicappers are no better at picking sports than you are. In addition, many of them are scammers.

For these reasons, you’ll want to be very careful if you’re considering paying a tout or tipster for their sports picks.

Pick Services

A sports betting pick service is a more organized form of touts and tipsters.

Unlike a tout or tipster, which tends just to be a single individual, a pick service is often a larger organization that might be comprised of many handicappers on staff. In short, pick services are often much larger than typical singular touts and tipsters.

Because sports pick services are often larger organizations, they tend to have more money to spend on marketing. Thanks to their larger marketing budgets, pick services will often times come across as more professional than touts and tipsters.

In many cases, pick services will have slick-looking websites and mailing materials. To the uninformed sports bettor, they will seem like they must really know what they are doing.

In some cases, there are legitimate pick services that employ skilled handicappers on their staff. However, there are still many scammers out there in the pick services realm. Be sure to see our tips below on how to stay safe so that you can try to avoid getting scammed.

How They Work

When it comes to sports betting touts, tipsters, and pick services, you tend to pay one of two ways. In general, you’ll either pay per pick, or you’ll pay for a larger group of picks.

We’ll go into more detail on both of these options below so that you’ll have a better idea of what you can expect when dealing with these handicappers.

Up first, many people opt to pay handicappers per tip. In this case, you’ll pay them for every lead that you want. For example, you might pay them $10 for their guidance on the Packer’s game this coming weekend.

After paying them, you’ll get their tip for that game, and then you’re done. If you want any more tips after that, you’ll have to pay more.

It’s worth noting that many of these handicappers also charge a winning percentage. On top of the flat fee, you’ll also pay a percentage of your winnings if their pick is right. You’ll want to get clarification up front relating to if there is a winning percentage charged by a handicapper.

It is important that you know if there is a fee, and that you have a good understanding of what the fee percentage is if your bet wins, since this can eat into your profitability.

Going on a per-game basis isn’t a bad way to get your feet wet. Overall, it allows you to try things out without risking a large amount of your cash. By doing this, you’re also able to see how good the leads from the handicapper are.

If you try out a few and have solid results, you then might consider doing more with that handicapper. On the other hand, if you pay for a few leads and they all turn out to be crap, you can move along and find yourself someone else to work with.

The other option when it comes to handicappers is to pay for a larger group of leads. Most often, you’ll pay for a week or an entire season of a particular sport. For example, you might pay $300 to have access to a handicapper’s leads for the entire NFL season.

What’s nice about this type of plan is that you tend to get a better bang for your buck if you have a legitimate handicapper that is good at what they do. You’ll get access to all of the handicapper’s tips for that sport’s season. If you go with a larger package option, you typically won’t have any form of winning percentage due to the handicapper.

We recommend that you don’t sign up for one of the season plans with a handicapper until you’re sure that they are legit and are not a scammer. The risk of signing up for a season plan is that your hard-earned cash is potentially gone forever if you fall for a scam artist.

For that reason, we suggest that you start with single games before moving into a seasonal plan.

What to Look For

If you decide that you’d like to use a sports betting tout, tipster, or picking service, we’ve compiled a list of our top three things that you should look for. Be sure to review these below and seek to find all three of them if at all possible. By doing this, you’re more likely to find a legitimate handicapper.

Verifiable Winning Percentage

Perhaps the most important thing that you should look is verification of their winning claims. When it comes to the scammers, they love to talk about their amazing picks in all of their marketing materials.

However, what’s important is that you find a site that can give you actual proof of their claims.

As you’ll see, many of these handicappers will preach about their insanely-good winning percentages. All too often, the claims sound too good to be true, and in most cases, they are. Remember that it is easy for these handicappers to talk a big game, but they might not be able to back it up with supporting stats and data.

If a handicapper does have a great success rate, they shouldn’t have any reason to hide their supporting results data. If they’re able to show proof of their successful winning record, that will aid them in earning more business.

Before you spend a dime with any sort of pick service, make sure that you seek one that allows you to verify their winning percentage.

Low Cost

If you do decide that you’d like to use a sports betting tout, tipster, or pick service, our suggestion is for you to find one that is low cost. Due to the high percentage of scams out there, we don’t advise you to spend tons of money on one of these handicappers.

The reason for this is that if you do end up spending money with a scammer, your money is wasted and most likely gone forever.

You’ll see in the next section that one of our tips to help you stay safe is to start small. That way, you’ll protect yourself from larger losses if you do end up with a scamming handicapper.

The biggest thing that you should avoid is plopping down hundreds of dollars or more in your first go-around with a new handicapper.

Referrals from Friends

One of the best things to look for is a referral from a friend. If someone that you know and trust has been using a picking service, you might ask them their opinion about it.

Ultimately, if your trusted friend is happy with what he’s been getting, you might be okay to try it out.

Make sure to inquire with your friend how his winning percentage has been, just to make sure that you’re likely getting in with a good handicapper.

Even with a referral from a friend, you should still consider doing your own homework before signing up with the handicapper. We’d also suggest that you start slowly. Your goal should be to see for yourself that you are also getting good results like your friend is.

How to Protect Yourself

In this section, we’ll cover our top tips relating to how you can protect yourself when it comes to sports betting touts, tipsters, and pick services. Be sure to review these tips and keep them in mind if you’re ever considering paying one of them. Using these tips, you might be able to save yourself from getting scammed.

Just Don’t Pay
The best way to protect yourself from getting scammed
is simply to not pay them for their tips.

If you don’t end up paying them for their picks, you won’t be able to get scammed.

While there are some people out there that are legitimate, the vast majority are scammers. They are marketing machines, and they prey upon newer sports bettors looking to get a leg up.

Since it is hard to identify the good from the bad, our advice would be to simply forget about paying these guys and instead use the information available to you for free on the internet, which brings us to our next point.

Use Free Information

Your best alternative to using a sports betting tout, tipster, and pick services is to do the handicapping yourself. Thanks to the internet, sports bettors have much more data and information available at their fingertips than ever before.

What’s nice is that the vast majority of this can be had for free if you take the time to poke around and do your own research.

Certainly, doing your own research and handicapping takes time. Understandably, many of you don’t have a ton of free time available. Just remember that many services use time savings as one of their main selling points.

Just because you don’t have a ton of time available to research your sports bets doesn’t mean that you should throw your money to one of these handicappers.

Many online sportsbooks offer tons of free information. In some cases, they’ll also have some of their own expert picks available for their clients. Google is another great asset to help you find more sports betting information and tips.

Ultimately, it comes down to how hard you look and how much time you can spend searching for this free information.

Trust Your Gut

Another good tip that will help you protect yourself is to always trust your gut. If something just doesn’t feel right, we’d suggest that you walk away.

It’s not worth risking it if something seems off to you.

With so many options out there, you can always check out other ones if your gut is telling you that something just isn’t right.

Watch for High Success Rates

One of the things that should be a monster red flag to you is if you see a sports betting tout, tipster, or betting service advertising ridiculously high success rates.

As a good rule of thumb, if you see one of these handicappers advertising a success rate of 80% or higher, you’re more than likely dealing with a scammer. Our advice would be to steer clear of anyone advertising high success rates.

To help put this into perspective, let’s take a quick look at professional sports gamblers. For these guys, a good success rate tends to be in the 50%-60% range. While that doesn’t seem like it is that high, that is the reality.

Professional sports bettors still lose plenty of times. If the pros that make a living off of sports betting are in that range, it’s hard to believe that a handicapper would be significantly higher than that.

Scammers use high success rates to help attract uneducated sports bettors. It’s hard not to be attracted to someone advertising an 85% success rate. However, you must make sure that you don’t fall for this like so many others do. It’s a pretty sure bet that you’ll waste your money on a scammer if you buy tips from someone advertising ultra-high success rates.

Start Small

If you do decide that you want to try out a sports betting service, we’d highly suggest that you start small. Instead of paying a large amount of money for an entire season worth of picks, start by just paying for tips on a single game or two and see how those go.

What you want to avoid is spending a large chunk of money and then realizing that you’ve been scammed.

After you judge your results from the first game or two worth of tips, you can then consider going back for more. Instead of jumping all-in, we’d suggest that you ramp things up slowly. Even if the first couple of tips go well, we’d still caution you not to go all-in for a season’s worth of picks just yet.

Take the time to make sure that the handicapper is providing you solid data over the long term. Once you’ve received some solid tips that help you increase your winning percentage over a longer time period, then you might consider investing more money with the handicapper.

Consider Your Bankroll

Before considering spending any money paying for picks, make sure to take your bankroll into account. It’s one thing to consider spending money on picks if you have a large bankroll. Unfortunately, many people don’t have a massive bankroll to work with.

Consider Sign Guy Thinking and Stack of Money

If you’re not working with a massive bankroll, we’d highly suggest that you not spend money on handicapper pick services. For an individual spending an average of just $5 or $10 on each of their sports wagers, spending money on picks doesn’t make financial sense.

In some cases, you’ll pay more for the picks than you will the actual wager. By doing this, you’ll end up eating into your profits pretty quickly.

For those of you with larger bankrolls, you should still consider things carefully before paying for picks. Make sure to factor in what the pick services will cost you and see how that impacts your bankroll.

You’ll want to consider the whole bankroll picture before proceeding. If you’re betting with a large enough bankroll, using a handicapper’s services probably won’t be a bad thing as long as the fees are reasonable and the picks are good.

Read the Fine Print

Our last suggestion for you on how to stay safe with sports betting touts, tipsters, and pick services is to make sure that you read the fine print. You’ll need to make sure that you don’t get sucked in too quickly by their marketing.

Along with taking some time to do external research on the handicapper, make sure you also read the terms and conditions.

When scanning the fine print, you’ll want to look for a few key items. First, make sure that you read up regarding how and when you can cancel. Ideally, there will be some window of time that allows you to get all of your money back if you’re not satisfied.

Also, look to see how the fine print is worded when it comes to disputes. You’ll want to know how they handle things if you have an issue down the road. Finally, make sure that nothing else sticks out to you as odd when you scan the document.

Frequently Asked Questions

What should I do if I’ve been scammed?

Your best bet is to start with your local authorities. Once you reach out to them, they’ll be able to help point you in the right direction if they can’t assist you with the issue. Before contacting your local authorities, be sure to gather up any and all supporting documentation that you have.

You should include any emails, credit card charges, or documents received from the scammer. By doing this, you’ll speed up their investigation.

Do I need the help of a sports betting tout, tipster, or pick service?

For the vast majority of sports bettors, there is no need for using a sports betting tout, tipster, or pick service. In today’s internet age, you have free access to most of the same information that they do.

However, you need to know where to find it, and you also need to have the time to look for it and know what to do with the information.

By no means is handicapping an easy or quick process. However, that doesn’t mean that you should spend money for someone else to do it for you. In most cases, these handicappers are scammers or just not good at what they do. You’ll be essentially throwing your money away in most cases.

Are all sports betting touts, tipsters, and pick services scammers?

No. However, the vast majority of them are. Due to this, you’ll want to exercise extreme caution if you decide to move forward with one of these handicappers. There are some legitimate and good handicappers out there.

Your goal is to find one of them to work with if you decide that you’d like to employ the services of a paid handicapper.
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