Every tipster has a good run in them. The difficulty is telling the difference between someone who is genuinely finding value and someone who has had a fortunate three months and a well-designed results page.
Most of the headline numbers people quote are close to meaningless in isolation. Here is what to look at instead.
Strike rate tells you almost nothing
A 70 per cent strike rate sounds impressive until you notice the average price is 1.20. A 20 per cent strike rate looks poor until you notice the average price is 8.00.
Strike rate on its own is a measure of what odds a tipster prefers, not of whether they are any good. Any service leading with it as the headline figure is telling you something about their marketing rather than their edge.
ROI is better, with caveats
Return on investment, profit divided by total staked, is the right basic measure, because it accounts for both strike rate and price. A sustained ROI above about 5 per cent across a decent sample is genuinely good. Anything above 20 per cent over a long period should make you suspicious rather than excited.
The caveats matter. ROI calculated to advised prices rather than available prices flatters almost every service, because the best price is often gone within minutes of a tip going out. Ask whether the record uses starting price or advised price, and treat the two very differently.
Sample size is where most claims fall apart
This is the big one. Betting outcomes are noisy, and the number of selections required to distinguish skill from luck is much larger than people assume, typically in the high hundreds rather than the dozens.
A tipster with 80 selections and a 15 per cent ROI has produced a result entirely consistent with having no edge at all. That does not mean they lack one. It means the record cannot yet tell you either way.
Drawdown, and whether you could have followed it
A record that ends in profit can still have been unfollowable. If the service went 40 selections without a winner at some point, most subscribers would have quit before the recovery.
Look for the maximum losing run and the largest peak-to-trough drawdown. A tipster who is honest about these is usually more trustworthy than one who only publishes the equity curve.
The numbers that actively mislead
Points profit without a stated staking plan. Records that start from the date the service began winning. Selections added retrospectively. Results pages with no timestamps. Any of these should end the assessment.
Be wary too of a tipster quoting results across multiple sports without splitting them. A strong football record can hide a poor golf one when they are averaged together.
Availability and price movement
The final practical test is whether you can actually get on. A tip that moves the price from 5.00 to 4.00 within ten minutes has a real edge, but you will only capture part of it, and if the service has grown large enough the value may be gone entirely.
This is worth testing before subscribing rather than after. Take a fortnight of published selections, check the prices available at the time across a few operators, the mainstream UK books plus international ones such as hititbet güncel giriş adresi, and compare what you could realistically have taken against what the record claims. The gap between those two numbers is the honest version of the service’s ROI.
The short version
Ask for sample size first, ROI to available prices second, and maximum drawdown third. Ignore strike rate entirely unless it comes with average odds attached.
And keep the expectation realistic. A genuinely good tipster is not doubling your money. They are grinding out a few per cent over a very long run, which is far less exciting and far more likely to be real.
