Let me state straight off the bat that it’s certainly possible to make a profit as an MMA subscription service. However, I believe with any subscription service, there are a few fundamental issues that people need to consider and which make a handicapper directory like this a much better bet, when it comes to MMA betting tips and more specifically, hitting high ROI.

The main problem with a subscription service is that it forces the person making the MMA tips / predictions to make some sort of pick on every event. If you’re getting paid for something, you gotta deliver something. This poses a few problems.

There isn’t always value on a card.
Sometimes all the odds are pretty much right. Or even worse, the bookies have got all the right winners but the odds are too wide. If that’s the case, you shouldn’t be betting. That’s basic logic. If the odds are paying out equivalent to a 70% chance of something happening, you should only bet if there’s actually a higher than 70% chance of it happening. If you think there’s a 65% chance of it happening and you bet at odds equal to 70%, you’d get better returns (on average) by playing roulette and putting your money on red.

Sometimes fights are just too damn hard to call.
It’s OK to admit you just flat out don’t know. Sometimes that applies to pretty much every fight on the card. Again though, a subscription service forces the handicapper to make a pick when there are too many intangibles for it to be a sensible bet.

Sometimes you pick the wrong fights to scout.
This has happened to me plenty of times personally. If you wanna scout properly, you probably need to watch 5-7 hours of tape per fight, minimum. If you get to the end of that scouting and decide the fight’s too tough to call, you wasted pretty much a day and have to move on to the next fight. Sometimes you’ll pick 3 fights in a row where you think the odds aren’t right to bet or it’s too hard to call and then what? You just spent pretty much a week’s worth of scouting time and you haven’t found any decent value. In an ideal world you just leave the event all together.  but if you’re running a subscription service, you gotta make a pick. It’s going to either be on one of these fights you decided aren’t good value or on a fight you haven’t had time to scout properly.

To give a specific example, I recently scouted Jake Ellenberger vs Stephen Thomson, Frank Mir vs Todd Duffee and Kevin Lee vs James Moontasri. I wanted to see if bets on Ellenberger, Mir and Moontasri were worth going for. In total I probably watched 30 fights and made detailed notes. At the end of the scouting process I decided:

– Ellenberger had a clear way to win but more than likely wouldn’t carry out a sensible gameplan, so I decided to leave it.
– I felt exactly the same for Frank Mir. I thought he should take Duffee down against the cage and wear him out but felt pretty confident he’d just stand and bang right from the off, which is a ridiculous gameplan.
– I felt Moontasri would probably lose a decision.

That scouting took an enormous amount of time, to the point where I had no time left at all to scout any more fights. If I was running a subscription service I would have had to bet on all 3 fights. I’d have probably gone for some weird prop bets like Moontasri vs Lee going to a decision. I have no idea what I would have gone for in the Ellenberger vs Thomson fight. However, as I didn’t HAVE to make a pick, I didn’t…. The only one I went for was Mir by TKO/Sub at +275, which was just too good odds to leave.

In the end that’s a pretty sweet little 2 unit bet – something I would have diluted heavily and trashed my ROI, if I was forced to make more picks, on which I was far from certain.

So, why is a handicapper directory better?
There’s less pressure. I picked the wrong fights to scout and choose not to make a pick; no problem… More than likely, someone else picked a different fight to scout or has as more detailed knowledge of some other fighters and is confident enough to make a good prediction. There are around 600 fighters on the UFC roster…. One person can’t be knowledgeable on all of them!

As the MMA Handicapper League Table develops over time, we’ll get to see who does a good job of this and rather than relying on one person making lots of picks, you get to follow several people making much more select picks. As a result, you’re going to see MUCH higher ROI because those handicappers are under no obligation to dilute their high value picks with a load of filler to justify a subscription fee.

Of course, you don’t need to just go by the leaderboard. You can follow whoever you like and find people who follow a particular betting style. If you like high aggression gamblers with high potential ROI, the stats on offer make it easy to find them. If you like steady returns over time, cool… you can find them too. Click the follow button and we’ll email you when they make new picks, so you don’t even need to check the site! When the picks are hidden because they’re paid picks, we’ll also tell you what sort of bet it is in terms of a straight pick a parlay or a prop pick… With parlays we’ll even tell you whether the bits of the parlay are straight picks or props, because from personal experience, I know not everyone has access to making prop bets.

Summary
So yeah, it’s not to say you can’t make money from MMA betting subscription services; you can… You just need to be aware that you’re probably going to get lower ROI if you do.  Just make sure that whoever you use, they’re independently verified.