The most prevalent marketing medium for sports services is some variant on the theme that so-and-so is “red hot” and therefore should pay him his money and follow his plays. Rogue services do this by creating all sorts of confusing and contradictory rating systems and hyperbolic descriptions for their games. How many times have you heard a tipster brag about being “16-2 in his MWC 500 stars for the month” or say his “Southern Conference total for the month is 60% lifetime”?

Basically, the worst in this industry can slice and dice their stats in any number of ways to appear “hot.” Or they can do what many of them do and simply lie about their performance. When I started out as a sports tipster, the internet didn’t exist (at least as it does today) and I had to rely on a phone for lineups and score updates. This phone dialer was sponsored by a bunch of touts who aren’t known for their veracity, and had to sit through a few pitches to get their 900 numbers before hitting the scores. A little Faustian bargain, to say the least, but it was an effective way of keeping up with scores in the dark ages before the Internet.

So one night we were at a party hosted by a guy we didn’t really like. My team and I were racking our brains to think of some bad pranks to play on the guy. Someone had the idea of ​​accumulating 900# charges on our brand’s phone bill. Since there is no such thing as 900# directory assistance, I came up with the only 900# I could remember: one of the dialer’s ads that had punched its digits into my memory through sheer force of repetition.

For the sake of discussion, I decided to write down all the NBA plays. I had less faith in his handicapping ability than a prognosis based on a dowsing stick or Ouija board, but since I wasn’t paying for the call, I figured I’d just see how the guy was doing. I wrote down his plays and checked his performance the next morning.

In his favor, the whole went 5-3 in his 8 moves. By any standard, a 5-3 night is a solid performance. Later that day I called the scoreboard and waited for everyone to start bragging about their 5-3 night. To my surprise, the whole thing didn’t say a word about his 5-3 night. That’s because he was too bragging about his legendary 7-1 the day before.

Now, I understand that the revelation that boiler room fans like about his performance is on a par with “pro wrestling is fake” or “games at the show are not up to date” as self-evident truths. However, the point I’m trying to make is that the desire to be the “hot dealer” is so great that the tout felt they had to embellish a solid performance last night.

So despite the fact that some handicappers like his performance, what’s wrong with trying to ride the hot handicapper? A lot: Not only is it an ineffective way to assess a tipster’s skills, it also has a number of statistical and theoretical shortcomings.

The easiest way to explain what I’m talking about is to borrow a disclaimer you’ll hear in every mutual fund trade: “Past performance is no guarantee of future results.” The sports betting environment, like that of stocks, commodities and other financial instruments, is a market and is subject to many of the same trends as other financial institutions (what economists call “market dynamics”).

The fact that the success or failure of a sports bet depends to a certain extent on the “whims” of a market (of odds and point spreads) and, to a greater extent, on other external events beyond the bettor’s control exacerbates the which is already a matter of simple logic: what a handicap does over a period of time (be it a day, a week, a month or a season) has no intrinsic correlation between the performance of a handicap for a year and the following. In other words, the sports betting market and the random patterns of events acting on it don’t care if I hit 60% last year. If I don’t do my job, analyze the numbers, get good prices to bet and take a few breaks along the way, I can end up beaten regardless of how well I performed in a later period of time.