Whether you are a lover of the NFL, NBA, NHL, the English Premier League or thoroughbred horse racing, the chances are you will make predictions on the outcome of the competition or next fixture, race, fight or match. Sports fans love testing their knowledge by making strong picks, allowing them to show off to fellow supporters that they know their stuff. Predict the winner of the EPL during pre-season or the Kentucky Derby months in advance of the race, and you’ll know what we’re getting at here.
Not much beats holding the bragging rights after making a smart call. But how do the most successful tipsters continually get it right while your picks are usually wide of the mark? What have they got that you don’t, and how do you get it? You may feel like some sports followers have the golden touch, correctly predicting how a horse race will play out or the scorer of the first touchdown in an NFL blockbuster. But there’s no secret formula, and it’s worth remembering that.
To get ahead of the game, you must put the work in. The most successful tipsters – the ones producing a steady stream of intelligent calls – don’t do it by accident, and there’s no luck involved. Like the athletes you watch on TV or bet on, the harder you work, the luckier you’ll become. All you need is a strong work ethic, a desire to conduct the necessary research and a full-proof, unwavering stats-based strategy. These are your tools for success, and in this article, we offer three tips for making strong sports predictions.
By the end of this article, you will know how to research a sports fixture and improve your predictions properly. This can be used to impress your friends and fellow sports fans or wager at major online sportsbooks as you target a profit. Everything you need to get started can be found on this page, so let’s get going.
Don’t look for a magic formula
Look on social media, and you’ll see there’s no shortage of online tipsters offering guaranteed wins – for a price. These tipsters offer to sell you their predictions which you can then use for betting purposes but beware. If someone is beating the bookies as often as they claim to be and enjoying the highlife, why would they need your cash? Spoiler alert – they wouldn’t, and they are nothing more than chancers.
Not every online sports tipster is a rogue, and there are some great apps available, but for every trustworthy tipster trying to help you make sound predictions, there are 20 scammers. Remember, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Anyway, if you were going to make losing predictions, you’d rather they were your picks for free rather than having to pay for someone else’s opinion.
Get the facts and figures
Do as much research into an event as possible before making your picks. You’ll be surprised how often a result follows the form or trends. There’s no such thing as having too much information on a fixture, and the bookies make their profits from snap decisions or poor choices. You can be sure the trading team have done their research, so you must do too.
How do you check the stats and past results? Simply look at the last five times two soccer teams have met or the last ten runnings of a major horse race, and you’ll often stumble across a trend.
What should you look out for? Any recurring age of the winners, trainers or jockeys. If it’s a fixture, get clued up on the last meeting and the H2H. Have past meetings been high-scoring affairs or tense matches? Does a particular player enjoy going up against an opponent? When you have gathered all that information, you will be in a position to make your call.
Check the experts
What are the pundits, ex-players and bookmakers predicting? They don’t always get it right, of course, but it’s worth knowing their predictions as they are right more often than they’re wrong, and, in most cases, it’s their job to be correct. Don’t let them sway your decision, but keep their approach in mind.