Why Tipsters Sell Tips, Not Winners

At some point in every punter’s life, tipsters start to look like the answer. You’ve had a bad run. Confidence is low. The markets feel confusing. Then someone on a screen, a website, or a mailing list confidently tells you who’s going to win.

All you have to do is follow. It sounds tempting, and that’s exactly why you need to be careful.

The first thing to understand about tipsters is this: most of them make their living from selling tips, not from backing winners. Their income depends on subscriptions, clicks, likes, and renewals. Winning bets help, of course, but excitement sells far better than consistency ever will.

They Sell Action, Not Value

A steady stream of small-priced winners doesn’t get people talking. A 16/1 “nap” does. That creates a problem straight away.

Good betting is about value, patience and saying “no” most of the time. Tipster culture is about action, confidence and always having an opinion. The two don’t sit comfortably together.

Nostradamus, the famous French astrologer, made thousands of predictions in 942 short verses over his lifetime. Some can be loosely interpreted as having come true, such as the rise of Hitler, but his writing was so ambiguous that it invited endless interpretation. The modern view is that he wasn’t really an oracle. He wasn’t often right, but he sure was often!

Sounds like a few tipsters I know!

How to Judge Tipsters Properly

Newspapers are a good example of this. The dailies with strong racing sections give tips for every race. You only need to look at the Racing Post Naps Table to see how good, or bad, these tipsters really are.

The useful part of that table is not the list of selections they make on any given day - they mainly lose - but the right-hand column entitled Level Stakes, exposes their expertise by showing how much they would have made to a level £1 bet over the year. The table looks something like this.....

I am being a little disingenuous here to make a point, because the Racing Post uses Starting Prices (SP) for these statistics, and once you have read the following pages you will probably never accept a bookmaker’s SP ever again.

Another issue is that tipsters never feel the bet the same way you do. They are being paid to do a job, so they must come up with something. If they put up a loser, it’s just another line in yesterday’s results. If you back it, it’s your money. Your bank. Your mood. Your discipline. That difference matters far more than people realise.

However, the key takeaway is to always assess tipsters critically and understand their motivations. And the good news here is that the Naps Table holds the tipsters to account by publishing their performance against a £1.00 stake. You can see this in the 5th column mentioned earlier.

If you're interested, you may want to check the result of that race. It was The Coral Vintage Stakes at Goodwood in 2026. Al Hudaiba came third. So finding winners isn't that straightforward is it?.

We have however, made a start and that's important. We are looking at tipsters critically. Read on, it gets more interesting when we look at Tipsters who ask you for money!

A Cautionary Tale

I once encountered a man who had developed a bustling sideline in horse-racing tips. Intrigued, I asked about the level of research he conducted and his rate of success. His response was revealing. He wasn’t particularly concerned with such matters, provided he released some form of tip each day.

His focus was firmly on the winners, which he highlighted enthusiastically, while any losses were simply disregarded and left unmentioned.

None of this is to say that all tipsters are crooks. Some are knowledgeable. Some are honest. A few even beat the market for periods of time. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: even a good tipster doesn’t remove the need for your own judgement.

If you don’t have that judgement yet, following tips won’t magically give it to you. In fact, it often delays learning. You get used to outsourcing decisions, stop questioning prices, and stop thinking about why a bet makes sense. You become dependent, and dependence is poison in betting.

Example: Free Tip Service Hype

On the 16 June 2026 I received text message from a tipster who had been running a free daily selection service for some time. The email was full of hype and excitement, and it read as follows:

“YESTERDAY WE SMASHED IT AT 13/8 - TODAY WE TARGET ROYAL ASCOT DAY 1! The momentum is completely unstoppable right now. Yesterday afternoon, our free daily selection delivered a highly clinical, dominant performance to smash home for the community at 13/8! The home office has been operating at maximum efficiency since I returned from Slovakia, and we continue to demonstrate week in, week out that consistent winning is driven by strict, uncompromising mathematical discipline,”

he warbled.

“We are keeping our feet firmly on the ground, completely ignoring the public noise, and heading straight to Day 1 of Royal Ascot for this afternoon's primary market strike. We have isolated a spectacularly bred, highly progressive juvenile rocket who is poised to completely outclass his rivals.

Today’s Selection:
Race: 15:05 Royal Ascot - The Coventry Stakes (Group 2) (Class 1)
Selection: CONFUCIUS”

It lost!. In fact, it came 6th.

Of course, he didn’t mention the 169 other tips he had made from the opening day of the year. They never do. Nor do they publish their full statistics.

Well just because he didn’t mention them doesn’t mean they weren’t made! So I decided to track them myself.

Here they are if you are interested:

As you can see, keeping a full record is crucial for understanding the performance of any tipster. The individual wins and losers are actually irrelevant. What is really important is the overall trend and consistency. Fortunately for you, I have done the hard work and kept a complete record.

If you want to see the full history of this tipster for that period, with the actual results, prices ROI etc, just click here. I’ll send it to you.

Why Full Records Matter

I took it upon myself to track every one of the 183 days for the 6 months ending 30/06/2026 where he made 155 tips. 47 were winners, 108 lost and there were 28 days where either he offered no bet or the horse he chose didn’t run. Tipsters who want your money don’t make a living from betting; they make a living from collecting fees from the gullible, lazy and uninformed.

Every time a winner appears, you are encouraged to go to their super-duper, bells-and-whistles, gold-plated, exclusive subscription service. Every time there is a loser, it is completely ignored. And they will never publish their full history. You therefore, would be wise to keep your own.

Had you have followed his recommendations, you would have lost a significant amount of money betting with a bookie. Less so had you used Betfair but losing is still losing isn't it?

Here is the real truth about this tipster's efficiency. Your Betfair ROE would have been in the region of -6.7%. Had you used a bookmaker, your losses would have been even greater, an ROE of around -16%. But here is the rub, believe me I have tested it. Had you bet on all the favourites in all those 183 days at the BFSP you would have lost just 1.6%

Market Reality

There’s also a practical problem that most people discover the hard way: once a tipster becomes genuinely successful, their prices vanish. Markets move. Liquidity dries up. Restrictions appear. And the very edge you paid for disappears under the weight of followers.

That isn’t bad luck. It’s basic market reality. And that’s why you won’t be getting any tips from me.

For most, results are often quoted to Best Odds Guaranteed prices that disappear in minutes. Losing runs are brushed aside as “variance”. Stakes quietly change. Selections are rebranded as “advisory”. And when things go wrong, there’s always an explanation: ground, draw, luck, jockey, timing. Sound familiar?

That’s not analysis. That’s damage control.

What This Course Is About

This course isn’t about shortcuts. It isn’t about secret lists, inside information, or paying someone else to think for you. It’s about understanding why a bet is worth placing and, just as importantly, why most aren’t.

If you can’t explain a bet in your own words, you probably shouldn’t be placing it.

Join the legions of people who are taking control of their betting and learning to make informed decisions. Some of them are already seeing significant improvements in their performance. So much so that they are prepared to publish them on our Results page.Results

So, if you’re serious about becoming a successful punter in your own right, this course is for you. Join me, Donny Ladd, and I’ll teach you how.

Login/Register Here

IT'S FREE!

My Background as a Gambler

For many years, I considered myself a casual gambler. Perhaps it was something inherent in me, given my background in financial services. Despite a forty-year career that could, at a stretch, be described as “successful”, my experience with gambling was quite the opposite.

I always viewed betting as a hobby, much like playing golf. I expected it to come at a cost. After all, bookmakers remain in business for a reason, don’t they?

A Shift in Approach

Everything changed when I retired and moved back to Doncaster, my birthplace and the home of classic horse racing. With time on my hands, I decided to stop treating betting like a harmless hobby and start treating it like a problem that could be solved.

I wanted to see whether disciplined analysis could do what gut feel never had: beat the bookmakers. Betting exchanges were reshaping the industry, and punters no longer had to fight the bookmaker’s overround in quite the same way.

For anyone willing to do the work, the playing field suddenly looked a lot fairer.

During 2024 and 2025, I gave myself one rule: be structured. The spark came from a conversation years earlier, in 2014, with a racing friend who explained how he attacked the Cheltenham Gold Cup.

“Donny,” he said, “the easiest way to find the winner is to shorten the list. Work out which horses can’t win, cross them off, and you’ll be left with something manageable.” Whether he followed his own advice that day I can’t say, but I do know this: he backed Lord Windermere at 20/1.

That advice stayed with me. But once the exchanges came along, I saw a twist on it. Instead of using “can’t win” to find something to back, why not use it to find something to lay? If I could identify the horses that had too many ways to lose, I could become the bookmaker for that bet.

It was the start of the National Hunt season, so I decided to jump in. Over the next five months, I won nearly £3,000!

Lessons from Lay Betting

Now, before you race off and start laying everything in sight, here’s the truth: lay betting can be brutally stressful. Sooner or later, you will make a mistake, and when you get hit, you get hit hard.

With lay betting you’re often opposing horses that should lose comfortably, which usually means you’re taking on big prices. In my experience, typically somewhere between 16/1 and 50/1.

And all it takes is one horse that hasn’t read your script to wipe out weeks of steady, boring progress. Try keeping your head when two of them win in quick succession. It’s gutting. Believe me, you need nerves of steel.

Losing runs are inevitable, and living with them day after day takes a very particular mindset. I also discovered that this approach was highly seasonal: effective in National Hunt racing, but far less reliable on the Flat.

What You Will Learn

The aim of this course is not to sell you tips or provide a tipping service. In fact, we have already explored why those rarely work in the long term.

Instead, the purpose is far more valuable: ,to turn you into a winning punter who doesn’t need tips from anyone.

If Lesson 1 has already stopped you handing money to a tipster, good. You’ve saved yourself the first avoidable loss. Now the real work begins.

In the coming lessons, I’ll show you how to keep proper records, use evidence instead of guesswork, and start making profitable decisions with confidence. By the end of Lesson 3, you will have enough practical knowledge to change the way you bet on horse racing for good.