When something is easy to develop and deliver it is usually available in abundance. When it’s difficult and requires a high level of skill and professionalism, it is scarce and hard to find.

A fitting way to describe the proliferation of punters, media tipsters and every man and his dog who is now providing their ‘expert’ opinion on horse racing, footy and other sports through their own tipping websites.

The world has moved quickly from fifteen years ago when the only Australian horse racing experts that you heard from or read about were speaking on your radio and television, or writing in the newspaper or in one of the racing magazines distributed to your local newsagent. Without the need to get a printing press and distributor, or a television or radio time slot, the market for horse racing tips on the Internet has grown exponentially.

With so much information available for racing fans about each race meeting in Australia, accessible from phones, computers and tablets, isn’t it easier than ever to back a winner?

There reality is – No it isn’t. In fact the over supply of information has made it even harder for racing enthusiasts to distinguish between racing intelligence and common ignorance. It sounds a little counter intuitive but the reasoning makes a lot of sense. As the horse racing tip market is now easier than ever to enter with a do it yourself free web page and a Twitter account, there is no scrutiny of the individual who is posting the information, which has led to a high concentration of sub-standard racing content across the web. The challenge for horse racing fans is to identify the real expert punters who posses genuine knowledge of horse racing form before you use the information that they give you. Here are a few pointers that will assist you with your efforts to identify genuine betting professionals offering their expert racing opinions.

Betting Tips

Betting professionals have a vast vault of knowledge which they have acquired through many years of trial and error. For horse racing fans this usually manifests itself as rules and guidelines to assist them with their decisions on race day. Betting professionals are usually open to sharing their betting tips with punters to demonstrate their knowledge and to build the confidence of potential buyers. Their knowledge and skill is much more sophisticated than a single rule or guideline, so they are not adverse to sharing this sort of information with the betting public on their tipping websites.

Betting history

You wouldn’t bet on a horse without a form guide so why take tips from someone who you have no knowledge about? Smart punters who publish their racing tips in the public domain are usually very confident people who prefer that you know about their background, and more importantly, that you understand how they select the horses that they bet on. You should look for a name and profile of the person providing the information on the tipping website. Understand how much work they put into their race analysis and what approaches they take to arrive at their tips in each race.

Don’t assume that every punter is reading the same form guide that you do to pick their winners. Smart punters usually apply several betting methods simultaneously, using the collective information obtained from each approach to arrive at their best bets. The more you know about an expert tipster and how they arrive at their selections, the more confident you can feel about backing them.

Betting Performance

Knowing who the punter is and how they pick their winners is only half of the equation. The other key data that you need before you take their tips is their actual betting performance. How well do they do on the punt? Many racing tipping websites will advertise statistics which suggest that the owner is a profitable gambler, but can you really trust someone that measures themselves with a huge incentive to tell a good story? What happens if the tipster you follow has a bad or mediocre year.

Will they show these statistics on their website? A good way to judge the authenticity of their statistics is to consider the profit percentages that they are advertising against some of the world’s most successful racing gamblers. World renowned betting professionals Bill Benter, Alan Woods and Zeljko Ranogajec have all made their fortunes from profits that sit between 24% and 1% on turnover, depending on their betting strategies. Within those life time profit statistics their may have been some years where they did a lot better, but rarely will you see profits that far exceed this range year on year. If you see advertisements proclaiming to have achieved much higher winning percentages, than you should question their authenticity.

To obtain the ultimate reassurance that a punter’s selections are profitable, it is prudent to get your selections from a website that proofs horse racing tips from betting professional like theGreatTipOff.com. If tipsters that you follow do not proof their tips ask them why they don’t and refer them to sites like theGreatTipOff.com.

There really isn’t an excuse they can provide which is plausible. It’s free for anyone to join and to place their tips for starters, and they benefit greatly by significantly opening up their market of prospective buyers. If they claim that they don’t want to steer traffic away from their site then tell them to do it anonymously for a period of time so that they can at least verify the profits that they are advertising. If their excuse is that they only want to disclose their information to a small group of punters to ensure that the betting odds are not effected, then you really need to question their credibility. The chances that a group of punters from a tipping website will actually impact the odds of a horse is almost impossible when you consider the vast numbers of punters betting each day and the twenty plus bookmakers taking bets on every race meeting in Australia.

If there is some credibility in this claim, there are still measures that the tipster could take to look after their customers here. They could create an on-line punters club and invite all their customers to join. Each customer would invest an amount they wish to bet and the tipster would place single bets on each of his tips. When the winning bets are paid out, each investor would be able to withdraw their winnings into their betting account on-line with a proportion of the profits transferred to the tipster’s account for payment of the tips. In this case the odds of the horse would drop after the bet is placed making everyone of his customers satisfied.

The world wide web is now easier than ever to join and so every punter is now only a few hours away from posting a website and claiming to be the worlds greatest betting expert. More than ever the punter needs to be vigilant and exercise their own due diligence before procuring another person’s racing tips. You wouldn’t buy a house from an owner that refused a pest and building inspection so think about your choices when the tipster who you follow gives you an excuse for not proofing their tips from an independent source like theGreatTipOff.com.