Friday 12 December 2014

Tipstrr Is Now 650% Faster

Today's post comes straight from the development team at Tipstrr HQ. We have been busy pulling apart our inner workings and tweaking them to get the fastest handicapping product on the market.

One of the main points Tipstrr's contact us about is the time it takes for their results to update on the site. This can be really important, especially when you have just won that all important Tipstrr Verified accumulator. Another reason we have been working on optimising the Tipstrr results algorithms is that we are getting a massive number of tips being entered into the system thanks to the awesome growing demand on handicappers wanting a Tipstrr site.

So what are the problems? Can't you just buy faster hardware? Crank it up to 11? Whilst we could just throw hardware at the problem, in the long run it's not a scalable solution and would jeopardise our ability to provide completely free handicapping sites on Tipstrr. Rest assured, this won't ever change.

So the development team here at Tipstrr HQ set off with a task to make results calculations run faster than Mr. Bolt himself. There are three main angles we looked at when targeting these performance improvements and that was Tipstrr's who have a large quantity of tips (more than 2000 tips placed), Tipster sites that contain many categories and Tipstrr sites that house lots of different Tipster's under one roof. We also threw in a mixture of sites that post a varied number of picks per day, anywhere between 1 and 30.

With all of the above in our test data set we started digging into our database internals. At the time of writing we use a customised MySQL 5.6 installation and learned quickly that SHOW PROCESSLIST is your friend when it comes to capturing really long running and intensive operations. Once we had narrowed it down to our suspect stored procedures we took a good hard look at what they were actually doing. MySQL EXPLAIN SELECT is another great tool here which can help identify why the database takes a while querying certain tables.

From our tests we saw that Profit/Loss and Result grouping was being recalculated several times in some complex joined queries. The solution here was to use a Resolution design pattern and start aggressively caching these lookup records in temporary tables. This sounds easier than it was. In reality this took a large amount of investigation making sure our results calculations were correct pre and post change. We also had to get clever with some of our queries so that using multiple temporary tables in single query blocks didn't cause us problems.

All in all, quite a heavy session of optimising based on our initial diagnosis. But what about the results? In short we were elated by how this affected overall performance. In some of our test cases we found it increased result calculation speed by 1700%, whilst the minimum we was able to achieve was a 650% increase. We would go as far as saying this was a success.

But what does this mean for your Tipstrr site? Is anything going to change? Yes and no. Whilst you won't be seeing any fancy new options to enable (sadly) this does mean that your results will update faster and there will be less stress on our hosting environment, thus making your site run faster. Sometimes these behind the scenes changes go unheard of, but they go a long way in making Tipstrr the best sports handicapping solution for all. Rest assured you are in safe hands and lets look forward to all the great new ideas coming to Tipstrr in 2015.

Thursday 4 December 2014

Version 1.14 - Larry Fitzgerald Released

We are happy to release version 1.14 of Tipstrr Engine, the aptly named "Larry Fitzgerald" Sticky Fingers. With this release comes some changes to tighten up validation and entry on the site. Tip scheduling is back after a bug fix and a fix for whole line numbers not showing odds for asian handicap and under/over is out.

You will now also see tip count per category in the drop down menu, this means you can quickly see which categories have active tips as shown in the image below.


For a complete breakdown of the release notes see our support article https://tipstrr.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/1000149162

Tuesday 2 December 2014

Tipster of The Month - November 2014

And we are back with our second 'Tipstrr of the Month' awards. After last month's success we are going to be bringing you the best tipsters in the business month on month.

Overview

Another busy month on the Tipstrr platform saw thousands of tips placed on our automated and verified platform for tipsters. Hard work from dozens of tipsters has seen the win rate improve across the board, something we're very happy with here at Tipstrr HQ. As we mentioned last month, the 4 awards are open to all tipsters and handicappers that use our platform, all you need to do to qualify is place 20 or more picks in a calendar month. If you can think of any other awards that could be good to give out, let us know, we'd love to hear your suggestions.

Be sure to check out the guys who will proudly be showing off their awards on their home pages for the next month before we crown new winners for December.

Tipstrr of the Month Award


Brazilian Football Tips

After a few months out, Brazilian Football Tips (BFT) returned this month, placing a total of 28 tips, with a very solid 17.2% Return on Investment. What makes this more impressive was the way he ground out the results the site needed to get back in the black. He knows his Brazilian (and European) football, so now he's back it could be a good time to check him out.

We have to point out a few notable mentions from a few few guys who performed very well in November:




Best Win Percentage Tipstrr Award


JC La Liga Football Tips

Last month's tipstrr of the month JC was still up there with the best and this time he notched the best win percentage award. Throughout November, JC managed a 7.5% Return on Investment from 34 tips, with a 59% win rate. Not quite as impressive as last month, but he continues to grow the bank balances of his members by providing well thought out (and ultimately, profitable) tips. Check him out if you fancy some great La Liga insight and analysis.

Five Star Football Tips (60%), and DDimitrov76 (67%) both performed well this month but didn't qualify due to selected too few picks, maybe next month they'll hit the minimum 20 required and put themselves in contention

Most Active Tipstrr Award


Bet MD Sports Picks


BetMD has proven himself over the past 6 months as a very profitable tipster, providing regular winning tips on a regular basis. This month he was just behind the top guys in terms of ROI, but covering so many sports means he has taken the Most Active Tipstrr Award for November. Since starting in May, BetMD has clocked up $20,000 profit based on predominantly $100-$400 bets, a real top performing tipster on a regular basis, with far more winning weeks than losing weeks, we can see why he is really increasing in popularity with Tipstrr users.

Indy Sports Picks and Kiitos Tips both came close to netting the award, but BetMD pipped them to the post.


Biggest Longshot Tipstrr Award


Kiitos Tips

Mentioned above as being in contention for the Most Active Award, Kiitos Tips have won the longshot award with the highest priced winner of the month. With 3 tipsters on the site, as well as a 'best bets' section, they are always active. Their winner was an Over 2.5 Goals Treble that included the games Hartlepool v Wycombe, Barnsley v Scunthorpe and MK Dons v Colchester. This bet was priced at an impressive 5.67 with Bwin.

The second biggest winner was at 5.29 from All The Best Tips, whilst a notable mentioned for Agent Tipster who had 7 of the top 10 priced winners in November.

Thursday 6 November 2014

Tipster of The Month - October 2014

Introducing the first Tipstrr of the Month competition. We will be making this a monthly feature for our Tipstrr's to showcase who has been kicking up a fuss in the sports handicapping industry.

Overview

October 2014 is over, and we've seen a great month with large numbers of tipsters on our platform providing good quality (and profitable) tips. Literally thousands of tips were placed during the month of October, and our tipsters have provided some impressive results.

The month showed some very strong results. Our Top 15 Tipstrr's made a combined Return on Investment of 7.77% from 1077 tips - a very good return. The below awards are open to all tipsters and handicappers using our platform, and the minimum criteria is simply to place 20 or more tips in the month...

Tipstrr of the Month Award



The Tipstrr of the month award goes to the Tipstrr who has the best return on investment over a minimum of 25 tips during the month. This month, we had a fair few people really in contention. The winner though, won't be much of a surprise to his large member base. With an ROI of 29.15% for October, JC La Liga came out on the top of the pile. Congratulations to JC (and his members), who made £110.35 each based on his modest stakes - we at Tipstrr know for a fact that a few of his members go 4/5x larger than his recommended stakes.

JC was (very) closely followed by Profit Bets, Crypto Tips and Swed Punters. There were another dozen or so guys who were well in to the positive figures, but still couldn't get close to these guys this month!

Best Win Percentage Tipstrr Award



Indy sports picks has impressed this month and wins our 'Best Win Percentage" award with a 61% win rate. October was a good month for him results wise, not only with win percentage, but also with his ROI, boasting a solid return of 8.72%.

Indy was closely followed by several tipstrrs. JC La Liga was only a fraction behind (and had Barca scored at home against Celta Vigo he would have take this award too), with Swed Punters, Italian Football Tips, Gibol Tips and Terry Tipster also in contention

Special mention to Alien EPL Analyst who actually had a better win rate (62%), but only place 18 tips so didn't qualify. Next month we are sure he will be up near the top again.

Most Active Tipstrr Award




Tipster Offer wins the most active Tipstrr award for October, with a huge 423 picks over the course of the month. A tipster who posts this many tips and still has good profit on the site is worth looking at for sure - he's built around £8,000 profit from bet predominantly around the £200 mark since starting on our platform.

Tipster offer was closely followed by Bet MD Sports, Indy Sports Picks, Kiitos Tips, who all amassed 300+ tips each. Keep it up guys!

Biggest Longshot Tipstrr Award



With a huge treble win at odds of 7.66 All The Best Tips win the long-shot award for October! Beating Profit Bets (7.13) and Agent Tipster (6.28) to the top spot. 

Sunday 2 November 2014

Version 1.13 - Ibrahimovic Released

Tipstrr Engine is now on version 1.13 as of this evening. There are several bug fixes including Tennis resulting for Asian Handicap and Under/Over markets as well as the previously mentioned email enhancements to decrease the time your tips spend in the email queue. We have also added a filter for live odds status, you should now only see live and open odds when placing a pick. To see all the changes see our support article https://tipstrr.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/1000141584.

Saturday 25 October 2014

Tipstrr Email, Because Fast Just Isn't Good Enough

If you had told the team twelve months ago that "Tipstrr would be the fastest growing sports handicapping platform in the world" we would have had a hearty chuckle and only hoped for all the effort we were putting into the system to reach the potential we knew it had. But the reality is that Tipstrr Engine has been a phenomenal success with over 100 live Tipstrr sites, across 5 continents, spanning 6 languages, 100's of weekly picks and a rapidly increasing member base. More and more sports handicappers are finding the tools we offer unbeatable. Not only have we taken away all the stress of running a handicapping site but we have also made a huge effort to stamp out fake handicappers in the industry with our well received Tipstrr Verified.

But with high demand comes great responsibility. We have been taking note of our members feedback and a hot topic was the time it takes for email to be sent from the site when posting picks. This can be crucial to you as a handicapper as you want to guarantee your members receive their picks on time so they can get the best prices.

We will be releasing shortly a change to our service architecture which increases our email throughput by a phenomenal 500%. This is just one of the awesome features that will be coming over the next few months, it really is a great time to be a Tipstrr as you receive all these service enhancements free of charge both premium Tipstrrs and Free sites.

Whilst on the subject of email, an unknown feature that really can help you as a handicapper is Tipstrr's Tip Scheduling. When entering your pick, remember that you can batch your picks together by publish time so that they all go out in the same email, just simply set a publish time in the future and when entering your other picks use the same publish time. Clever eh? This means you can avoid spamming your members and make sure that your emails always hit their inbox.

Saturday 13 September 2014

New How-To Video: Add a Banner to Your Tipstrr Engine Site

In today's how-to video we show you how to add and edit the home page banners on your Tipstrr Engine site. These are great for promoting offers or showing important site information. They can also be targeted to members and non-members as well as including images. Make sure you spend some time learning how to modify these as they are one of the first things your users will see on your site.

You can see the help and support article on our support site.


Wednesday 10 September 2014

New How-To Video: Add an ROI Item to Your Tipstrr Engine Site

A trickier how-to video today. We show you how to add a return on investment (ROI) item to your Tipstrr Engine home page. These items allow you to display your all important return on investment percentage, which is seen by most in the industry as the best way to determine the quality of a handicapper. By following our video you can see how to make the most out of your verified results by breaking down your tips into categories such as sport, league or bet type. Whilst most Tipstrr's may have a decent ROI percentage, you can truly set your site apart by showcasing the tips and markets that you excel in.

An example of this can be seen with Terry Tipster who has kindly agreed to lend his ROI percentages to this article. As you can see from the image below, Terry has a good football ROI of 8%, but by adding his own ROI item to Tipstrr Engine, he has shown that in the 1x2 market (win/draw/lose), his ROI is an improved 14%.

Return on Investment Items
Source: http://terrytipster.com/
Date: 10/09/2014 at 01:00 GMT


There are many more settings to play around with, so make sure you spend some time testing, tweaking and perfecting your Tipstrr Engine ROI items.

You can see the help and support article on our support site.


Tuesday 9 September 2014

New How-To Video: Add a Home Feature Box to Your Tipstrr Engine Site

Here is the next in our series of how-to videos for Tipstrr Engine. In this video we show you how to add Home Features or Feature Boxes to your Tipstrr Engine web site. These are the boxes that appear under the banner and can include an icon, title and description. They are great for advertising articles, offers or external links to your customers so make sure you get to grips with how easy they are to change on your Tipstrr Engine site.

You can see the help and support article on our support site.


Monday 8 September 2014

New How-To Video: Add a Blog Page to Your Tipstrr Engine Site

We have been hard at work improving our help and support, articles, and media for Tipstrr Engine. Introducing the first in a new series of "How To" videos, this video shows you how easy it is to add a blog post to your Tipstrr website. We will be releasing more of these over the coming weeks so stay tuned for more details on the fastest growing tipster platform in the world.

You can see the help and support article on our support site.


Tuesday 2 September 2014

What it Means to be Tipstrr Verified

Here at Tipstrr, we are dedicated to improving the reputation of sports tipsters and sports handicappers. We proof and verify all tipsters that use our platform. What’s even better is that it is done automatically, in real time!

We may have only launched recently, but we already have 60+ sports tipsters and sports handicappers using our revolutionary platform. At Tipstrr, we’ve used years of experience in the sports betting industry to provide a solution that makes running a tipster website simple, and hassle free.

The sports advisory industry is huge across the globe, with many people having their unique insight or angle to share. Some are very profitable, whilst others struggle to break even, and some are just plain awful. However, with no regulation the industry has developed a pretty woeful reputation, with plenty of untrustworthy tipsters and cappers out there. We decided to do something about it – build an automated system that meant posting dodgy results or false profit levels is no longer part of the equation – put simply, it’s impossible. TipstrrEngine is just that; an automated system to eliminate result manipulation.

There are lots of third party tipster proofing/tipster verification websites on the internet (Secret Betting Club, Pick Monitor, Eagle Eye Sports Monitor to name but a few), and they’re great. However, we feel there is simply not enough proofing or validation in this industry. We decided to do something about it, and anyone who places tips on our tipster platform will be automatically verified by our system. Meaning their results are accurate and trustworthy

How Does it Work?


It is quite a complex process, but the idea is simple:
  1. Using the unique integrated tip entry system, the tipster selects their event, their bet type and their stake.
  2. Once confirmed, this tip is in the TipstrrEngine system and is published for members to access.
  3. At the end of the game, the system finds the outcome, calculates whether the bet won or lost and then updates the results section of the website.
  4. The result of the tip is then added (win/loss), and the system updates overall profit, along with ROI calculations and a results graph.
  5. At no point can the tipster make any amends. As a result, we place a “Verified by TipstrrEngine” logo on all tips that go through this process – if it has the logo, you can trust it is accurate and correct.
If you want to follow trustworthy sports tipsters or sports handicappers, then just check out those on our platform. The results they show are the results they've given their hundreds of members over their lifetime on TipstrrEngine. Don’t risk joining a service without knowing their credentials. We have built this so people can have confidence in the experts.

If you’re a sports tipster or handicapper, then get in touch about moving your service to TipstrrEngine. It’s free to get started and it will certainly save you the time and hassle of site admin. You can focus on your service and your customers, the two most important aspects!

Contact support@tipstrr.com for more information

Tuesday 15 July 2014

Tipstrr World Cup 2014 Predictions Competition Results


The World Cup has finished, with the Germans reigning supreme after several ruthless displays (and a few mediocre ones too). We’ve already seen 11 of the 32 managers leave their posts, but of course Hodgson is still in charge of England after their successful World Cup campaign *cough*.

We hope everyone enjoyed our predictions competition, and we would happily welcome any feedback with regard to what you liked and/or what you’d like to see change in future competitions.

Some Stats and Figures

  • Lowest scoring game (0.39 points/entry) - Uruguay v Costa Rica (1-3)
  • Highest scoring game (5.37 points/entry) – France v Honduras (3-0)
  • Most correct scores in 1 game – France v Honduras (24)
  • Most 0-0 predictions – Jon Hurley - 9 (3 were correct)

Corrects Scores

With 64 games to predict, there were always going to be plenty of chances for people to get a few correct scores. Richard Allen and Thomas Vandsted managed an impressive 10 correct scores each – not bad going at all! Out of 78 entrants, only one person failed to get one correct score (we won’t say who!), so everyone did pretty well.

Winners

  • 1st Overall (Games Console): Terry Tipster (TerryTipster.com)
  • 2nd Overall (Football Shirt): Thomas Vandsted (SelectTips.com)
  • 3rd Overall (£50 Free Bet): Richard Allen
  • 4th Overall (£30 Free Bet): Tom Sparke
  • 5th Overall (£20 Free Bet): Jon Hateley

  • Phase 1 (£25 Free Bet): Simon Del Guidice (72 points)
  • Phase 2 (£25 Free Bet): Roberto Maida (50 points)
  • Phase 3 (£25 Free Bet): Roger Smith (55 points)
  • Phase 4 (£25 Free Bet): Ian Williams (61 points)

Notes

Both 1st and 2nd Placed overall are tipsters using the Tipstrr platform. They have kindly stated that they will decline their respective prizes, and give them back to Tipstrr to allow us to run another competition in the domestic season! Thanks Guys!