Do you follow a newspaper tipster?
I'm guessing a large part of the betting public do, whether that be a regular tabloid tipster or a specialist newspaper tipster, which these days means one of the Racing Post columns.
I've just been looking at the Racing Post Naps Tables and Tipster Challenge Tables.
In the Press Challenge which pays a first prize of £2,000 to the top tipster at the end of the year there are only twelve entries.
Two of those are The Favourite and Top Course Trainer, which I guess are included to give some context to the tipster performance but probably also to make yp the numbers!
The Press Challenge table is also interesting for the data that it doesnt include as much as it is for what is presented.
It is a year long competition and each tipster starts with a £1,000 starting bank and one pound is staked on each tip. The tipster with the biggest bank at the end of the year wins the prize, but the table doesnt show the size of those yearly banks in the table.
IE we don't know what loss has been made so far this year by each tipster.
What is does show is the monthly profit or loss to £1 stakes, they obviously have the annual figures to date, but I guess it would be demoralising to punters to show them 
If anybody has these tables from the printed Racing Post from the last day of each month so we could build up an annual figure that would be useful?
So what do we get? For the annual stats all we get is the number of tips and the number of winners and a strike rate.
Favourites have won 36% of races this year. I don't quite understand the turnover column but I'm guessing it means how many races the tipster bets on and that the favourites are less than 100% because of joint favourites etc. If anybody knows different then please let me know in the comments.
The Suns Templegate has a 27% strike rate but only selects 48% favourites.
We get profit and loss facts about Naps, which I assume is for the month and that shows Templegate Naps at + 9 points, the negative figures from other tipsters are not big enough for this to be the year to date figures.
Where we get the most info is in the month to date.
This month favourites are winning with + 28.81 from 403 bets, not great but this is at industry SP and as it's favourites we would expect them to return a loss in line with the average over-round. So favourites are over performing this month, so far!
The only other tipster in profit this month is Patrick Weaver from The Star who is +6.44 from 382 bets.
Interestingly Top Course Trainer shows a big loss for the month and a terrible strike rate for the year.
You can check out this data for yourself here http://www.racingpost.com/news/tips_home.sd#topHorseTabs=press_challenge_form
I'm going to make a note to collect the tables at the end of each month to see if we can glean anything worthwhile from them in the future.
Today's Selection
3:30 Plumpton Fred Le Macon – eachway bet – 8/1 Paddy Power, Bet 365
http://www.napstats.co.uk/
has comprehensive info. of paper tipsters
Does the turnover column represent the percentage return on bets? So backing the favourite would result in a loss of £7.21 etc.
Aye ok
give me tipsters like yourself who ferret out stats and fine tune them love your articles , have not come across a good newspaper tipster yet
An alternative might be to look at the newspaper tipster race as a source of lay bets. Some of the newspaper tipsters are reliable for back bets (which may be profitable with an appropriate staking plan): others are equally reliable at picking losers and offer a strategy for lay bets. If you have the time, record the results from http://www.racingpost.com/news/tips_home.sd#topHorseTabs=naps_table and make your own judgements.
I confirm ANGE’s comment that you can as well LAY
them, I did it (about 7-10. per day) a few years
ago, mostly I was more up than down. Then you can
guess what happened after about3-4 weeks. It took
3 weeks to show I was a genius, and 2 days to show I was something else!
“we don’t know what loss has been made so far this year by each tipster.”
We don’t know by looking at the bare figures but it’s a fairly straightforward exercise to convert turnover to profit or loss.
Today, Tuesday 15th April 2025 the favourite is showing 94.32% turnover on 2,490 selections. Subtract 94.32 from 100 to get a loss of 5.68%. Multiply 0.0568 (to make a percentage fraction) by 2,490 gives a result of 141.43, that is a loss for the year of £141.43.
This can be done for all the tipsters, I only do it on the first day of the month with everything set up in an excel sheet just to update the figures. As noted in the comments, laying the Top Course Trainer consistently produces profit, but only if you stick with them, at one stage last month they were showing a healthy £40 profit but gradually slipped back to produce another consistently losing month, and currently are only a couple of quid down for April. Be aware that the RP uses SP figures and some returns can be distorted by this, in one case a Tct selection won at 20/1 but I had played it at 29.00, a significant skewing of the figures.
I’m fairly new to laying horses, it’s opened up a whole new world and I’m always researching new angles, but this one is proving quite significant. Good luck to layers and backers and I’d be very interested in some feedback.
G.
Every day it’s a Goldmine. Just view the Racing Post overnight or early morning, see what they offer as the forecast favourite…..then LAY it….80% +++ success rate but that’s too easy and takes no time at all
I would say the easier and shorter the better.
After this morning’s update the Press Challenge Tipsters have all just made it into the negative and are cumulatively £519.66 down. I don’t favour the blanket approach, at one time I was trying to lay all of them in every race, but am currently laying 4 particular tipsters in particular situations, just occasionally all 4 in 1 race (about the most I can handle) but mostly just 1 or 2, about 10-15 selections in 8-10 races per day, all at £1 per time, and yesterday hit the £100 profit mark, very happy. This time next year, who knows?
G.