Even if you are a seasoned sports fan, you may find it difficult to predict the outcome of a sporting event. This is not something to be self-conscious about, though. In most cases,
enthusiasm and hope play a much higher role in predicting the result of a soccer match, for example, than facts. Soccer fans often tend to be overly enthusiastic about their favourite team,
putting their heart into the matter. And sometimes, this leads to disappointment.
When reading match previews in the press, you may wonder how newspapers predict the outcome of a soccer match. They don’t have magic crystal balls that show them the match in
advance – they rely on a much more mundane thing to see the future: statistics.
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What’s a tipster
When you check out a soccer match in the ![]()
Betway Mobile App, you’ll see that there is a clear favourite (a team more likely to win) and an underdog (the side least likely to win) with the odds clearly showing which one is which. The odds are set by professionals called “oddsmakers”,
people who work at bookmakers that use the information to predict the most likely outcome of the match. The oddsmakers at Betway look at the statistics of each player, the performance of the team as a whole, and a lot of other bits and pieces and calculate the probability of each outcome, and create odds based on these predictions.
These professionals are not only used by bookmakers to set their odds, though. There are people who use their in-depth knowledge of a sport – say, soccer – and their piles of data not to set odds but to predict the results and sharing betting tips with the general public. These
“tipsters”. If you wonder what the job of a tipster is like, check out the 2005 movie ![]()
“Two for the Money” with Al Pacino and Matthew McConaughey which will give you some insights into the world of sports predictions.
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Data. Lots of data
Tipsters and oddsmakers rely on years worth of statistics to predict the outcome of a soccer
match. And the data they use is incredibly diverse: they take into account not only the stats of
individual players but their performance while playing at home vs away, their past injuries, the
stats and the history of the referees, even the state of the turf at the stadium. And when it
comes to predicting the exact outcome of the match, they also calculate with even the smallest
things like the number of supporters on the grandstands – sometimes, the opponents’ chants
can become rather demoralizing – the time when the match is played, and even the weather.
After all, a wet and slippery turf can truly alter the way the players perform in the field.
Tipsters don’t predict the future – they use big piles of information and complex formulas to calculate the probability of each outcome. Their method is scientific – and their predictions are
usually right.