In most parts of the world sports betting is a popular activity. However, the vast majority of gamblers are doomed to be long term losers. The main reason for this is that they are unable to find bets with expected value.
If you are betting limited amounts as a recreational gambler this is not really a problem. The losses you incur betting, can be viewed as payment for entertainment, similar to a ticket to the cinema or a sports event. However, the reality is that many punters are betting because they have an ambition to make money.
Most of these punters will lose a significant amount of money as beating the bookmakers is a lot harder than it appears. The betting companies have a lot of advantages over their customers. The main one is probably that they, like this article on Godsofodds shows, apply a margin to every market they price up.
Punters betting to show a profit need to be smart about the bets they place. Because of the margin the bookmakers price in to their odds, not many people have what it takes to pinpoint the betting propositions that will win money in the long term. There are different ways of getting this done though.
If you have access to information about injuries or similar before it becomes widely available, or a superior understanding of the dynamics of a particular sport or league, you can use this to evaluate the likelihood of the different betting outcomes more accurately than the betting companies.
Another possibility is to build a model for calculating the chances of the various outcomes. However, this is far from easy and most people building models are unable to come up with something able to beat the betting markets. Fivethirtyeight has a lot of resources and even if they have put together quality models for several leagues like the NFL and the main European soccer leagues, it has been shown that the performance of their models is inferior to the market.
This clearly shows the magnitude of the task at hand and illustrates why we would not recommend anyone to try to use sports betting as a vehicle for generating revenue.
There are several websites selling betting tips, but we would recommend that you stay well clear of all of these. Even if some of these tipsters can be true gems the reality is that most tipsters charging for betting tips are frauds selling something of no value as they are not able to make long term profits themselves.
Using tipsters to get advice about what to bet, can make sense, but we recommend that you exercise great caution. In our opinion it would be much wiser to use a free tipster rather than to pay for betting tips. There are several examples of websites offering news and analysis as well as betting tips for a sport or league.
This is a good site for Serie A betting predictions and you can do far worse than this if you are looking for Bundesliga betting tips .
However, the very best advice we can offer is to think carefully before you get involved in the betting game at all.