Danil Emelyanov, Head of AI Labs at BETBY, writes for SBC News to explain how the culture of betting tips must adapt to the ever-changing nature of sports betting. With more information now than ever for punters to digest, sportsbooks must be able to make that information not only easy to understand but also take advantage of it to provide an elevated user experience.
Betting tips have existed for a long time. Before online sportsbooks, bettors relied on newspaper columns, specialist magazines and informal insights shared between people who followed a specific sport closely. The format was simple, and the purpose was practical: educating bettors and helping them deal with uncertainty.
As sportsbooks moved online, tips became a structured product. Betting expanded, markets multiplied, and it became harder for bettors not only to keep up but also to decide where to focus their attention. Tips were introduced to reduce friction, highlight opportunities, and support a better understanding of complex betting environments.
That role still exists today. What has changed is the environment in which tips operate, along with the expectations placed on them.
What Bookmakers Were Trying to Solve
From the beginning, betting tips were meant to simplify decision-making and help bettors navigate complexity more confidently. Even a single football match generates a large amount of information, including head-to–head record, tactical matchups, weather conditions, or even scheduling. Processing all of this information requires time and experience that most bettors do not have.
Tips offered a way to narrow that information down. How? They pointed bettors toward specific markets and provided a starting point for further evaluation. For example, a tip might focus on a key player’s injury before a match, helping bettors understand how this could affect a team’s performance. If a top scorer is unavailable, a tip might make bettors look at under goals or player props focused on assists or minutes played, rather than a match outcome.
This means that, as betting platforms evolved, tips also supported engagement by encouraging bettors to explore markets with greater awareness, mostly pre-match though, due to the complexity of live tips.
Scale Introduced New Challenges
As betting went digital, the amount of tips available increased significantly, with automated systems and broader data coverage making it possible to generate insights across many competitions at once. However, this shift brought new challenges that were less visible at first.
One of the most significant is data volume and quality. Modern sportsbooks work with extensive datasets, ranging from historical results and player statistics to live feeds and odds changes. On their own, these datasets offer little value. What matters is how effectively they are processed and interpreted to support clearer understanding.
For instance, when analyzing betting markets for a tennis match, a useful tip would synthesize all the data available and explain, “on hard courts, Novak Djokovic wins 85% of his first serve points, making his first-serve percentage key to his success in this match against an opponent who struggles on fast surfaces.”
This showcases how useful tips rely on strong data providers and analytical models capable of filtering information, identifying relevance, and presenting it in a way that is easy to understand. Without that layer of interpretation, tips quickly become overwhelming or meaningless.
Timing and Market Sensitivity
Timing also plays a critical role in how tips are perceived and used. Betting markets can move in a matter of seconds, especially in popular competitions or live scenarios. A tip that arrives too late may still be based on sound analysis, yet no longer reflect current market conditions.
This makes synchronization a central issue: tips need to align with the exact state of the match at the moment they are shown to the bettor. Achieving this consistently, across multiple sports and competitions, requires careful coordination between data feeds and analytical systems, something only proper AI technology is capable of.
The Importance of Context
Over time, expectations around betting tips have grown as well. Today, bettors tend to look for information that helps them interpret markets rather than pre-defined choices.
Context has become crucial to achieve this. Why? Because educational insights that provide historical references, explain typical team behaviour in a specific scenario, or highlight relevant game dynamics help bettors make sense of what they are seeing. This approach is particularly valuable in live betting — something only a few providers, like BETBY, can deliver — where markets change rapidly and decisions are often made under pressure.
By offering contexts such as “five of Arsenal’s last 6 Premier League matches have produced over 2.5 total goals, with both teams scoring in 4 of those games,” instead of conclusions like “Arsenal is likely to win the match against Liverpool”, tips support more thoughtful engagement with betting markets and allow users to decide whether they want to bet on the win, goals, or even other markets like player shots on target.
Regulation and Responsible Gambling
Besides context, regulatory frameworks also play a major role in how betting tips are built and presented. In fact, in many regulated markets, tips are reviewed closely to ensure they do not appear to encourage excessive or impulsive betting.
As a result, operators often have to adjust the way tips are written. The emphasis has shifted toward informational language that explains situations without directing behaviour and, in some jurisdictions, this has required changes to tone, structure, and presentation.
For example, in Brazil, the rollout of the new regulatory framework meant that tips could no longer recommend specific betting actions. Instead, they had to present data and context clearly. A tip for a match might now say, “both teams have scored in 6 out of the last 8 meetings”, rather than stating “there’s a high probability that both teams will score today”. This simple but crucial change helps operators comply with local regulations, ensuring tips are seen as information rather than explicit advice.
That said, balancing usefulness with regulatory compliance remains a complex task because insights need to remain engaging and relevant while fitting within responsible gambling guidelines.
Building Trust Over Time
Another key factor is trust, which can influence the way users perceive tips. Even well-designed tips will experience periods where outcomes do not align with expectations, and what matters in those moments is consistency and clarity.
Tips that clearly position themselves as informational tools tend to retain credibility over time. Bettors are generally aware that following tips doesn’t guarantee wins, but confidence diminishes when insights feel vague or overly directive. That’s why transparency and consistency help maintain long-term trust, reinforcing tips as a source of understanding rather than promises of outcomes.
Why Quality Tips Matter
When betting tips are built with attention to data quality, timing, context, regulation, and trust, they serve a broader purpose within the sportsbook experience.
For bettors, they reduce information overload and provide structure when navigating complex markets, helping them learn how to interpret data and market dynamics more effectively over time. For operators, they encourage more sustainable engagement by supporting informed interaction rather than impulsive behaviour.
As betting platforms continue to grow in complexity, tips that succeed in turning large amounts of information into clear, usable insights remain relevant. That ability ultimately defines whether tips contribute meaningfully to the betting experience or fade into background noise.