Sports Betting Touts, Tout Services, and “Expert” Handicappers
What are Tout Services?
Tout services are businesses where expert handicappers provide picks to subscribers for daily and weekly game results. A handicapper studies every major sporting event over a specified period, finds the best picks and offers them to loyal customers.
This takes a lot of the guesswork out of a gambler’s periodic bets, providing help and advice to a better who might feel lost or confused betting the point spreads and other current proposition bets. Gamblers need a few tips before they run out to find a tout service, so that I will provide a few suggestions of my own.
The Tout Service Must Be Cheap
When you start searching for a legitimate tout service to help you make picks, the handicapper must be able to provide their picks at a low cost to the gambler. I’ve spoken before about gamblers facing the challenge of the vigorish, which forces a break-even gambler to lose money.
Because the house takes a rake of your wagered money for operating costs, a player has to win at 52% to break even against the odds. When you tack on buying picks from a handicapper, those picks have to be terrific to offset all these costs. Therefore, the best handicappers need to charge a reasonable fee and make up the difference in volume–selling to a more significant number of gamblers. The bottom line is this: if you have to pay exorbitant fees to buy picks, it won’t be worth the cost, anyway.
Tout Service Must Be Accurate
As they say in sports, “that’s why they play the games.” No such thing as a sure pick exists in the sports world because each side has talented athletes who train obsessively and strive for excellence. Meanwhile, oddsmakers at crypto sportsbooks are trying to handicap the game accurately, setting up money lines and point spreads that decide which way to bet is difficult.
So when your tout service makes a pick, things can go wrong. What you’re looking for are consistency and accuracy. No one wager should be used to judge the tout service, but you’ll need to gauge your service’s effectiveness over some time. Lucky streaks happen even to the worst gamblers, so take with a grain of short-term salt success the way you would short-term failure.
Keep a Record of Wins and Losses
Don’t Trust, Verify!
To that end, keep a record of your wins and losses so that you can test your expert handicapper against tangible results. Don’t take their word for it, but test to verify if they know what they’re talking about over many years. This way, you have a scientific evaluation of your handicapper’s effectiveness.
Don’t Fall for Scam Artists
Don’t fall for scams from the handicapper. Many scam artists offer a free pick to prospective members, hoping to lure in repeat customers who won’t get the picks free the next time. One common scam is to offer all four options on a game in equal parts to the body of new gamblers brought to them by advertisements.
Imagine the Green Bay Packers and Chicago Bears are playing on Sunday Night Football. The standard options on this bet would be Packers/Bears and Over/Under. This means four betting options present themselves: Packers/Over, Packers/Under, Bears/Over, and Bears/Under. A charlatan could offer 1/4th of their new clients each of those options with a moneyback guarantee. Only one-fourth of the customers will win, but those customers are on the hook for subsequent picks. The remainder of the customers has their money refunded (or, in some cases, don’t, depending on the type of scammer). The important thing is that many new customers have been added, and the so-called handicapper hasn’t analyzed much of anything.
What Makes an Expert Handicapper?
That being said, many skilled handicappers exist online and amidst the public. The best handicappers have a proven record. Many of the tout services are run by oddsmakers who used to work for the Las Vegas casino-sportsbooks or some other major sportsbook. These people may be tired of making someone else all the money, or perhaps they no longer want to work for someone else.
In these cases, the handicapper puts their considerable talents to work, making themselves money (and a reputation). Since the person you’re buying picks from spends as much time analyzing their wagers as the oddsmaker at the casino, the tout service is sometimes wonderfully accurate.
Can Tout Services Help Me?
If you enjoy a good gamble but don’t like the work of filtering through stats, sports news updates, and injury reports, then using a tout service might be the best way to go for you. The last thing you need to do is bet using blind luck or a gut instinct. You court disaster when you use hunches, team loyalties, or other emotional methods to pick games. Use a professional if you don’t want to do the work yourself. Just be sure the expert handicapper you choose as a tout service is a qualified expert and not one of those con men I described above.