Search for betting tips in Australia and you are handed selections. This page hands you none, on purpose. What it gives you instead is the test you can run on any tip, free or paid, in about a minute, because the question worth answering is not what to back but whether a particular tip is worth acting on.
The whole test rests on one idea that most tip services quietly skip: a tip is a selection plus a price. The selection on its own says nothing about value. Work out a fair price for the market, compare it with the price you can actually get, and the tip either has an edge or it does not.
A tip is a selection plus a price
Value is a gap between two numbers. A tip that names a runner or a team and no price has supplied one of them, so there is nothing to compare, and nothing to check afterwards either.
Hold a selection fixed at an illustrative fair price of $2.50, which is a 40% chance, and change only the price on offer. Edge = offered price / fair price - 1.
| Price you can get | Edge against a fair $2.50 | What the tip is |
|---|---|---|
| $3.00 | 3.00 / 2.50 - 1 = +20% | A bet worth taking |
| $2.75 | 2.75 / 2.50 - 1 = +10% | Still a bet |
| $2.50 | 0% | A coin flip with the margin removed |
| $2.20 | 2.20 / 2.50 - 1 = minus 12% | Paying the bookmaker to hold your money |
One selection, four verdicts. That is why "back the home side" is not a tip and "back the home side at $2.50 or better" is, and why a tip delivered with no price cannot be graded honestly even after the event: whoever keeps the record can quote whichever price flatters the result.
Tip: a tip with no stated price, or no stated minimum price, fails the test before you even look at the selection.
Test any tip in one minute
Three steps, with illustrative prices of my own rather than any real market.
Say a tip arrives advising a selection in a two way market at $2.50, and the best price you can actually get when you read it is $2.45. The market around it is quoted $2.35 on that side and $1.67 on the other.
First, turn each quoted price into an implied chance: 1 / 2.35 = 42.55% and 1 / 1.67 = 59.88%. They add to 102.43%, and the excess over 100% is the bookmaker's margin.
Second, scale both down by that total so they add to 100%: 42.55 / 102.43 = 41.54% and 59.88 / 102.43 = 58.46%. The fair prices are 1 / 0.4154 = $2.4072 and 1 / 0.5846 = $1.7106, so call them $2.41 and $1.71. How to remove bookmaker margin sets out the method in full, and fair odds covers what the number does and does not mean.
Third, work the edge on the price you can get, not the price advised:
| Price | Edge against a fair $2.4072 |
|---|---|
| $2.60 | +8.01% |
| $2.50, the advised price | +3.86% |
| $2.45, the price you got | +1.78% |
| $2.41 | +0.12% |
| $2.35, the quoted price | minus 2.38% |
| $2.30 | minus 4.45% |
Example: the tip was advised into a 3.86% edge. You bet it at 1.78%. A slip of five cents took 2.08 of those 3.86 points, which is 54% of the whole edge, and the selection never changed.
Why the price you get decides the result
Read that table as a ladder rather than a list. Four small steps from $2.50 down to $2.30 move the edge from plus 3.86% to minus 4.45%, a swing of 8.31 percentage points, on the same selection in the same event. Nothing about the opinion changed. The price did all of it.
This is the arithmetic behind the commonest complaint about following tips. The record is kept at the advised price and your bet is not, and everything that happens between a tip being published and your money going on works in one direction, because every reader is backing the same thing at the same time.
Three habits protect that gap, and none of them involves finding a better tipster:
- Write your own minimum price down before you look at what is on offer, so the number is set by the fair price rather than by whatever you can still see. Mine above is the fair $2.41, which makes every row under it in that table a pass.
- Hold accounts at enough bookmakers that the tip is still live somewhere when you read it. A tip quoted at a bookmaker you do not use is worth only what your own accounts offer, and line shopping costs nothing beyond the accounts you already hold.
- Then actually pass when the price is gone, which is the whole of the discipline. A missed bet costs nothing. A bet taken 12% under fair costs 12% of the stake in expectation, whatever any one result looks like.
Risk: betting involves risk. A tip with a genuine edge still loses most of the time at long prices, and a losing run says nothing on its own. There is no guarantee of profit. See responsible gambling for limits and support.
A free tip quotes somebody's price, and whose is not neutral
A free tip is not a worse tip, but one thing about it decides where the quoted price comes from. Free feeds are usually published with a single bookmaker's price beside the selection and a link to that bookmaker, and that pairing is paid for: the tip is the attraction and the account is the product. Affiliate tipsters explained sets out who pays whom and on what terms, and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's advertising and selling guide is the standard that says a commercial relationship must not be hidden.
The consequence for this page is narrow and arithmetic. The quoted price is evidence about one bookmaker, picked partly for reasons that have nothing to do with the price, so it is not the number to run the test on. Take the $2.50 above. If the paying bookmaker shows $2.50 and the best price across your own accounts is $2.38, your edge against the fair $2.4072 is 2.38 / 2.4072 - 1 = minus 1.13%. The same tip is a bet worth taking for somebody who holds that one account and a losing bet for you, and nothing about the selection distinguishes the two cases.
So treat the quoted price as an input to check rather than a number to accept, and note that this check costs nothing: your own accounts answer it before the tip can cost you anything. Fake tipster red flags covers the feeds where the quoted price was never available anywhere.
An unpriced tip cannot be sized either
A tip tells you what, and if it is a real tip, at what price. It never tells you how much, and a tipster's "three units" is their bank and their appetite for risk, not yours. Bankroll management covers setting the bank, and betting units covers the unit you size off it.
What belongs on this page is that the stake comes out of the same number the price test produced. The Kelly stake is the edge divided by the price minus one, as a share of your bankroll, so the measured edge is its input. On the 1.78% edge above at $2.45, that is 0.0178 / 1.45 = 1.23% of the bank, which on an illustrative $2,000 bank is $24.55. A quarter Kelly, which is common, is $6.14.
Now run the same sum off the advised price instead, the way a follower copying a record's stakes effectively does. A 3.86% edge at $2.50 gives 0.0386 / 1.50 = 2.57% of the bank, or $51.47.
So a 2% slip in the price, five cents on $2.50, is a 52% slip in the right stake: $51.47 against $24.55. A price error does not stay small on its way into a stake, because dividing by the price minus one magnifies it.
Note: a tip with no price is not only ungradeable, it is unsizeable. There is no edge to divide, so any stake attached to it comes from somebody's confidence rather than from arithmetic.
The record's closing line value and yours are two numbers
Closing line value is the gap between the price taken and the closing price: CLV = price taken / closing price - 1. Closing line value sets out the method and why it reads an edge off fewer settled bets than a profit figure does.
The part that belongs to a tip is that there are two of them, for the same reason the edges differed. A published record computes CLV on the advised price. Your bet has its own, computed on the price you got.
Take the same tip a third time: advised at $2.50, taken by you at $2.45, and say it closes at $2.33.
| Whose CLV | The sum | Result |
|---|---|---|
| The record's, on the advised price | 2.50 / 2.33 - 1 | plus 7.30% |
| Yours, on the price you got | 2.45 / 2.33 - 1 | plus 5.15% |
Both beat the close, and that is the useful half: a feed whose advised prices keep landing ahead of the market's last view is doing something real, whether or not you got them. Only the lower number describes your bets, though, and a feed can keep a healthy CLV in its record while a follower who is always five cents late sits at zero. So read the record's figure as a fact about the tipster and compute your own from your own log, as how to check a tipster record sets out. CLV in horse racing covers using the Betfair Starting Price as the close.
What a tip must carry before it can be judged
If any row here is missing, the tip is not judgeable, and no record built from it can be checked.
| What the tip must state | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| The selection and the market | A line or total bet at a different line is a different bet |
| The exact line or handicap | Minus 15.5 and minus 14.5 settle differently |
| A price, or a minimum price | Without it there is no edge to compute and no record to audit |
| Where that price was available | A price at a bookmaker you do not hold is not your price |
| The time it was published | A tip timed after the start is not a tip |
| A stake, in units | So the record cannot be restaked after the result |
| The settlement rule it assumes | Voids, dead heats, scratchings and abandonments change the sum |
Whether a paid feed is worth its fee on top of all this is a separate sum, worked through in are tipping services worth it.
Where B337 fits
B337 sells no tips, and that is worth being blunt about on a page targeting this search. It is odds comparison and betting automation software. Prices, expected values and tipster records in it are information rather than advice: B337 does not give personal financial or betting advice, and nothing in it is a prediction, promise or guarantee of profit.
What it does is the checking. The Terminal lines up racing and sports prices from 40+ bookmakers side by side with Betfair back and lay, price history, closing lines and expected value overlays, so the two numbers this page asks you to compare sit on one screen. Terminal View adds your own de-vig settings for the fair price. Prices are read on a repeating cycle rather than tick by tick, so a price on screen can trail the bookmaker's own: confirm it in your account before you bet. A free account opens a limited view of the Terminal with live odds.
On copy betting, sold as the Tipping Pro plan, each feed's record is worked out by B337 from the tips its tipster published through the platform and how those bets settled, covering strike rate, ROI, turnover and closing line value, beside how many tips have settled and when the feed started. The tipster does not type those figures in. Any signed-in account, free included, can browse them, and a tracked record is still not an audit, a rating or a recommendation.
Copying is the same software doing the same job on your side of it. The bot runs on your own computer, places copies only into bookmaker accounts you hold, and sizes them from your settings rather than the tipster's. Nothing is placed while that computer is off, asleep or offline, so a tip published then is simply missed.
Risk: betting involves risk. A tracked record describes past tips only, copies can land at shorter prices than the record shows, and a bookmaker can limit stakes, void bets or close an account. For free and confidential support call 1800 858 858 or visit gamblinghelponline.org.au.