bwin Sportsblog - Other Sports - Looking at horse race tipping services

When it comes to tipping services then there are some very bad ones out there and it is a simple case of “buyer beware”. One such line that some of the worst ones take is that they quote strike rates. It could be something along the lines of “this has shown a 50% strike rate over the past 100 races”. Well there are numerous potential problems with doing this and the first one is that the tipster or tipping service may not be telling the truth and it could be a blatant rip off. That is obstacle number one but there are others as well. A sample size of 100 races is very small to draw any conclusive proof and so a figure of 50% in terms of winners could be nothing more than a short term anomaly. So you need to be careful of sample size but the third problem is that strike rates themselves do not tell the full story. One may argue that it would be basically impossible to lose money with such a strike rate but you would be wrong. If you took 100 bets and you won 50 of those 100 bets at $1 per bet then you would have wagered $100 in total. But what if the average price of your winners was 1-2? This would mean that you would have only returned $75 out of the $100 that you wagered for a net loss of $25 and this is despite winning 50% of your bets. So this one example highlights how even a large percentage of winners can fail to offset the total amount staked and show you a positive return. To show a positive return means returning more than you risked and in this instance you risked $1 on 100 races for $100. Only 50 of those bets won returning $50 in stake money and $0.50 per bet at the odds quoted for another $25. So this series of bets would have cost you $0.25 for every bet that you placed despite your seemingly impressive strike rate.