BetFirm review: a picks marketplace with big records and a free-day guarantee

A shop window with fifty names in it

BetFirm says Jack Jones started it in 2003, and he is still on the masthead as editor in chief. The site works as a marketplace. The picks page lists roughly 50 handicappers and about 150 packages on the day I read it, each with a price and a buy button: a single college football total for $39.95, a four-pick daily card for $49.95, a three-pick package at $99.97. Jones's own page sells passes from $59.95 for a day to $1,999.95 for a year, and season passes for one sport at $699.95 to $799.95.

That is a lot of choice, and every package is sold in the same voice. Nearly all of them come with a promise in capital letters, and nearly all of them carry a record.

The free sheet

The free picks page is the part I'd use. About 20 cappers post a play a day, and most show the line and the price, Spurs -7½ at -115 or Stars +131, so you can see what you'd have to lay. Some come with a full write-up and some with one line. The page says, to its credit, that these are "the lowest rated" plays from each service.

There is no record for the free picks, and no time stamp on most of them. That means you have to keep the score yourself, and I'd do exactly that: note the price when it goes up and the price at the close, for a few hundred picks, before deciding any capper on the sheet is worth paying. The free picks page says why the close tells you more than the won-lost column.

Reading the founder's record

Jones's page says his premium plays are 7,223-6,303 over the last 3,320 days, and that a $1,000-a-game player is up $324,050. That is 53.4 percent over more than 13,500 plays, and if it is right it's a real edge, a modest one. It's also not quite the arithmetic you'd expect. At -110, betting $1,100 to win $1,000, that record comes to about $289,700, so the bigger figure must include plus-money prices or bigger bets on some plays, and the page doesn't say which.

The figures also move around the site. His NFL record reads 673-538 on one page and 669-534 on the season pass page, and college football is 1,253-1,048 in one place and 1,250-1,039 in another. A few games either way doesn't sound like much, but a record that changes depending on which page sold it isn't being kept in one ledger.

The picks page says the experts are "independently tracked". It doesn't name the tracker, the method or the period, and the paid listings show no line, no price and no unit size. Elsewhere records are quoted as "57% (93-69) run" or "+46 unit totals run", each from its own start date. I've always found the start date tells you more than the run. Pick the day after a bad week and anyone looks good.

What the fee costs you

Take the founder's numbers at face value. Over 3,320 days that is about 9 years and about 1,500 plays a year. If you bet $100 a game, the claimed profit works out to about $3,560 a year. The 365-day pass is $1,999.95, so more than half your profit goes back to the shop, and that's on the best record on the site. Bet $50 a game and the pass costs more than the record says you'd make. That's the sum on what cappers are, and it is worse for a single $49.95 package, which has to win a lot just to pay for itself.

The promise on the button

Most packages say they will profit or the next day is free. Jones's passes say profit or you get an extra period added. That isn't a refund. If the picks lose, you get more picks from the same capper, and the page doesn't say how "profit" is measured or over what stretch. Some listings promise a win with no remedy stated at all. I never liked any shop that sold certainty, and in a market where 52.38 percent breaks even, nobody should.

Before buying, I'd ask BetFirm for a full pick history for the capper I wanted, with the time and price on each, who tracks it, what a "unit" or a "10*" means in dollars, and the written terms of the guarantee. The pages I read show no terms of purchase and only a media email for contact.

No capper takes the risk out of a bet, whatever the button says. Keep each bet to the same small slice of your bankroll, set a loss limit, and stop there.

The free sheet is worth a look. Keep your own record of it.