Pickswise review: free picks with the price on every card, paid for by sportsbook ads

Free, and why

Pickswise is a picks and previews site for the NFL, college football, baseball, hockey, the NBA, college basketball, soccer and UFC. Everything on it is free. The home page says its picks, analysis and educational content "don't cost a thing" and "will always stay free". (Our old listing spelled it Pickwise; the address is pickswise.com, and pickwise.com forwards there, so it's the same service.)

The terms explain how that works, and I'll give them credit for saying it out loud. The business model, in their words, is affiliate marketing: Pickswise is paid when someone goes from its site to a sportsbook and opens an account. The copyright on the site belongs to Intellr Inc., and the contact page gives an office address in London and an email. That's the whole of the company history the site gives, so that's all I'll give you.

So you're not the customer here, exactly. The books are. That doesn't make the picks bad. It does mean the page is built to get you to open an account somewhere, and on the home page the offers sit right beside the picks.

The price is on every pick

This part I like. A Pickswise pick shows the bet and the number: a moneyline at +156 at one book, with the same bet listed at other books from +138 to +154, or a spread at -1.5 +106. Each analyst has a page with his picks, the game time and a short write-up.

That's the right way to post a pick, because a pick without a price isn't a pick, it's an opinion. The gap between +156 and +138 is the whole argument for shopping the price. On a dog at those numbers, the best price wins you $156 on $100 and the worst wins $138. Bet that side a hundred times and the difference is real money.

What I'd want added is the time each pick was posted. A price is only useful to you if you could have bet it. A well-followed site moves lines, and a pick posted at +156 in the morning may be +140 by the time you read it.

Where's the record?

The home page says "We don't hide our results" and "we lay it all out", and the terms mention "results of previous picks". I read the home page, the terms, the contact page and one analyst's page, and I didn't find a won-lost record, units or a profit figure on any of them. The analyst's page I read listed his latest picks, not his results. If the results are on the site, they aren't where a bettor would look first.

A free pick still costs you something if it loses, so the record matters as much as with a paid service. I'd want every pick an analyst made, losers included, at the price posted, graded at a fixed stake. The site does have a guide on what units are. It doesn't say what size its own analysts bet.

How I'd use it

Use it for the reasoning. The write-ups give you the case for a bet in a few lines, and that's useful whether you agree or not. Then keep your own book: for each pick you follow, note the price on the card, the price you got and the price at kickoff. After a couple of hundred, the closing line value test will tell you more about an analyst than his own page does.

Don't let the offers beside the picks pick your book. Shop the price across the books you already have, which is the one thing the pick cards themselves encourage.

And remember it's still your money on the line. No picks site, free or paid, removes the risk of a bet. Set your loss limit before you start and bet each pick at the same small slice of your bankroll.

Free is a fair price. I'd still like to see the losers.