Stay Away From Name Brands
For most of your life you've probably been told to stick with the name brands. That makes good sense when you're dealing with electronics, cameras and most other expensive purchases.But when it comes to sports services, the opposite holds true much more often than not for one simple reason. Most of the well-known handicappers will lose in the long run.
The vast majority of well-known handicappers didn't get to be well-known because of their ability to pick winners. They became well-known because their primary objective has been to promote themselves, not their results.
That practice has been around since the 1980s when the list of best-known touts essentially read like a who's who of scam artists and it still carries forth to this day. By now, many people are familar with some of the tales from the sports service industry in the 80s.
Sports services were not above giving out opposite sides of the same game. If your last name began with A-M you were given one team, if your last name began with N-Z you received the other team. That way at least half of the buyers would be happy.
Then there's the now-famous tale of the sports service taking out an ad boasting of its 7-0 performance on Saturday. Due to advertising deadlines the ad had to be submitted before the games were even played.
While the Internet has made some of those practices disappear, new ones have taken their place.
Lose your 50,000* Lock of the Year? Simple. Release your 100,000* Lock of the Decade the next day. You always have the Lock of the Decade or the Lock of the Millenium to fall back on.
Some services today are known for having a Game of Year once or twice a month. That way they can advertise they won their Game of the Year. They just don't tell you about all the ones they lost.
There are some quality sports services out there but the chances are you haven't heard of them. Neither have I. What we do hear about are the same services who are backed by people with big pockets and are only looking to make them bigger, results be damned.
My gneral rule with any sports service is to be skepical, but that especially holds true with the ones I have heard of. Ask yourself why the name is familar. If it's because they have a long track record of being successful, such as Right Angle Sports that's one thing. If it's because you see them on television or webcasts boasting about how great they are, that's something else entirely.
Sports gamblers can save themselves quite a bit of grief by using some basic common sense and remembering that just because you've heard of a particular handicapper it doesn't necessarily mean that they're any good.
Likewise, just because you haven't heard of a particular service or handicapper it doesn't mean they're not any good. As I mentioned earlier, there are some decent ones out there.
View each service on its own merits and you'll be better off in the long run.
