Prediction sites and prediction games are not the same thing
Dardan Hasku3 min read
Search for a football prediction site and you get two completely different products wearing the same name. Knowing which one you are looking at saves a lot of wasted evenings.
The first kind hands you an answer
Tips sites. They publish predictions for today's fixtures, usually with percentages attached, often with an affiliate link to a bookmaker nearby. You read what they think will happen and decide what to do with it.
There is nothing wrong with the format, but two things are worth knowing. Almost none of them publish a full record, so you cannot check whether last month's confident calls actually landed. And the business model is usually the link to the bookmaker, not the accuracy of the tip.
The second kind asks you for the answer
Prediction games. Nobody tells you what will happen. You write down what you think, everyone else does the same, the results settle it and a table ranks the lot of you. What you get out is not a tip, it is a score for how well you read the football.
The quickest test of which one you are on: does the site tell you what to think, or ask you? If nothing on the page requires an opinion from you, it is a tips site.
Which one do you actually want?
| If you want to | You want |
|---|---|
| Know who somebody else thinks will win | A tips site |
| Find out whether you read matches well | A prediction game |
| Argue with friends about the weekend | A prediction game |
| Read match previews and stats | A tips site, or a stats site |
| Have something at stake without money | A prediction game |
What separates a good prediction game
If you land on the game side, the differences that matter are not the ones the homepage shouts about.
- Scores, not winners. Picking home, draw or away is too easy to separate people by October. Scorelines split a room instantly.
- Hard matches worth more. If a coin flip pays what a walkover pays, the safest coupon wins and nobody learns anything.
- A visible record. Every claim about how good somebody is should be checkable from their public picks.
- Free, honestly. Check what happens to your email before you invite anybody.
The record thing matters more than it sounds
The reason a prediction game is more useful than a tips site, if what you want is to get better, is that it keeps score of you rather than of somebody else. Every pick you have ever made stays on your profile with what it earned, so patterns show up: whether you overrate home teams, whether your brave calls actually pay, whether you are any good at draws.
On BankerBall every match also carries a K stamp for difficulty, so the record tells you something honest. Twenty correct calls on walkovers is not the same as five on genuine coin flips, and the points say so.
One thing neither kind should do
Promise certainty. Football's most likely single scoreline sits at roughly one chance in eight, which we went through in how often anyone gets a correct score. Any site claiming much better than that is selling something.
If you would rather call it yourself than be told: this week's coupon is open, free, points only.
Call this week's matches