Every racing tipster has a winner to tell you about. The 33-1 shot at Cheltenham, the Grand National at 50s, the nap that came home on the bridle. What they rarely volunteer is the other column: the losers, the prices that were really available, and the running total.
The Racing Post keeps that running total for the newspaper tipsters in its Press Challenge, settling every selection to a £1 level stake at starting price. When we checked, the tipsters at the top of the table were all showing a loss. That is not a scandal. Tipping a horse in every race on the card, the night before, is close to impossible to do at a profit.
So this is not a list of people who will make you rich. It is a list of horse racing experts worth listening to, and why, judged by tests you can apply to anyone who wants your attention or your subscription.
How to judge a horse racing tipster: five tests of trust
- An independently proofed record. Every tip logged before the off, at a price you could have taken, and settled by someone other than the tipster. The UK advertising guidance for tipsters says much the same: claims of past success should be provable, ideally with tips recorded independently before the event.
- Reasoning you can see. A tip with an argument (the trip, the ground, the draw, the jockey booking) teaches you something even when it loses. A bare name and a price teaches you nothing.
- Time served. A hot month is noise. Years of public tipping is evidence.
- Who pays them. Bookmaker-owned media, affiliate sites paid when you open an account, subscription services paid by you: none of these rules anyone out, but each pulls in a direction worth knowing about.
- How they handle a losing run. Every tipster has one. The ones worth following admit it, explain it, and never tell you to double your stakes to chase it.
The ten entries below start with records you can check, or that claim independent proofing, then move to the pundits worth reading for their reasoning, the leagues and trackers that help you find more, and a specialist for American racing. Where a figure or a claim comes from a tipster’s own website, we say so.
The best horse racing tipsters in the UK: ten experts and services worth your time
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Tom Segal, Pricewise (Racing Post)
Pricewise is the nearest thing British racing has to an institution in tipping. The Racing Post column began in February 1987, the idea of its first writer, Mark Coton, and its principle is in the name: find the horse whose price is wrong, not simply the likeliest winner. Tom Segal has written it since the early 2000s. In a 2016 interview he said he had held the job for 15 years.
He passes more of our tests than anyone. Every Pricewise bet is published before racing with the advised price, so the record is public whether it flatters him or not. He has been candid about bad stretches, calling 2015 his first bad year in the role and blaming too many seconds and thirds. His method is unashamedly human: no set system, plenty of race replays, and a belief that the jockey is “the biggest edge you have got”. The column moves markets, too: in 2005, William Hill’s chief executive blamed Pricewise for a dent in the firm’s results.
The catch: much of it now sits behind the Racing Post’s paywall, and because the column moves prices, the odds he advises are not always the odds you will get. Read him on Pricewise at the Racing Post.
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The newspaper tipsters: Racing Post naps table and Press Challenge
If you want independent proofing for free, this is it. The Racing Post settles the selections of tipsters from national, regional and specialist titles to a £1 level stake at starting price. The Press Challenge covers every race where the paper carries a full selection box; the naps table tracks each tipster’s most confident bet of the day. Neither the tipsters nor their papers do the counting.
The tables throw up names you will never see on a billboard. Paul Jacobs, who has tipped as Farringdon in the Morning Star since 1996, had won the Racing Post naps table three times by 2013. In the 2023-24 jumps naps competition, the Racing Post’s West Country correspondent, James Stevens, finished top with a profit of £22.36 to £1 stakes, 63 winners from 155 naps, despite being allowed to tip only horses trained in the West Country. “There are days when you can’t get a winner,” he said afterwards, which may be the most honest sentence in tipping.
The catch: newspaper tips are written the night before, without the final going or late non-runners, and one good season is not a long-term edge. Look for consistency across years.
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Steve Lewis Hamilton (SLH)
A professional punter of the old school. A Racing Post “Masters of Betting” profile described nearly 40 years of betting for a living, a career that began when he left his job at Smithfield meat market to bet on the racecourse. He now works from a base in Chesterfield, and his approach is built on pricing up races himself and betting only where he finds value.
His paid service sends bets by text, with fuller analysis on calls and by email, across the Flat and jumps. The SLH website says the service was founded in 1995, that every bet is “proofed in advance for independent verification” and that he has “a long history of proofing to Racing Post”. We could not find that proofed record published for us to check, and the site makes no specific profit claim, so treat the record as the service’s own claim until you have seen the figures.
He makes the list for longevity and a clear method. Ask to see the proofed results before you subscribe.
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Stephen Harris (Bets & Horses)
Disclosure first: Stephen writes for us. He is a horse racing expert, a former oddsmaker and a journalist covering UK racing, and he wrote our beginners’ guide to betting on horse racing as well as the quick guide on our homepage. He also talks racing on his YouTube channel.
The oddsmaking background is the useful part. Someone who has set prices understands the bookmaker’s margin from the inside, which is what a newer punter most needs to learn. He passes the reasoning test comfortably. He does not publish a proofed tipping record with us, so judge him on the quality of his explanations rather than a profit figure. More on Stephen’s LinkedIn profile.
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Betfair’s columnists: Kevin Blake, Tony Calvin and Paul Nicholls
Betfair’s racing hub runs previews from a strong roster. Its tipsters include Tony Calvin, Kevin Blake, also an ITV Racing pundit, and Rhys Williams, while the trainer Paul Nicholls and the jockey Ryan Moore give “the inside track” on their own runners and rides. It also draws on Timeform, which Betfair bought in 2006.
The writing is the strength: long, argued previews that show their working. The weakness is the first and fourth tests. The hub shows no profit-and-loss tracking for its tipsters, and Betfair is a betting operator, part of the Flutter group that also owns Paddy Power and Sky Bet. Nicholls on his own horses is useful news, not independent analysis. Read Betfair for the thinking and make up your own mind.
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Racing TV and Dave Nevison
Racing TV is a subscription channel, launched in 2004 as Racing UK, and is run by Racecourse Media Group, which its chief executive describes as “wholly owned by its racecourse shareholders”. The racecourses, not a bookmaker, own it.
Its tips section runs daily selections, including a nap of the day and its Expert Eye picks, alongside tips from Dave Nevison, a professional gambler who wrote about that life in A Bloody Good Winner: Life as a Professional Gambler. We could not find a public, settled record of its tips, so treat them as informed opinion rather than a proofed service.
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HorseRacing.net
HorseRacing.net is a free tips site with an in-house team: Raceolly (Geraint Williams), its daily tipster and a long-shot specialist; the editor, Billy Grimshaw; Steve Chambers; and @RoadCheltenham for ante-post Cheltenham tips. It also collates the newspaper tipsters, including Templegate in The Sun, Newsboy in the Daily Mirror, Robin Goodfellow in the Daily Mail, Rob Wright in The Times and Farringdon, and keeps its own naps table settled to £1 stakes.
It is open about who pays: free tips exist, it says, because it makes money from advertisers and bookmaker partners. Ante-post tips carry the date and price they were given, but the site does not say who checks its naps table, and the in-house team has no independently proofed record. Best used as a one-stop page for the newspaper selections.
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OLBG
OLBG turns tipping into a public league. Members post tips, the site settles them, and its horse racing table ranks tipsters by profit over the past 12 months, calculated to a 10-point stake, with strike rate and profitable months alongside. Only tipsters in profit over the year, with a tip still to run, make the live list.
The records are kept by the site, not the tipsters. But a league that ranks by recent profit rewards whoever is hot, and OLBG itself warns that profit built on one or two good months may reflect a few big-priced winners. It also says it may receive payment from the operators featured on the site. Look for plenty of profitable months, not this week’s leader.
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The Tipster League
The Tipster League began as a horse racing tipster competition built to help punters find top-performing tipsters from across the web, and now says it ranks tipsters “by verified results since 2018”, updated after every race.
A tracker passes the first test only if its method is clear, and the homepage does not set out how results are verified or at what odds bets are settled. Use it to shortlist tipsters, not to choose one.
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Mike Brunker (American racing)
For the Kentucky Derby, the Breeders’ Cup and the Triple Crown, look across the Atlantic. Mike Brunker is a retired Las Vegas Review-Journal editor who writes the paper’s horse racing column, published online on Thursdays and in print on Fridays, with big-race selections that include exacta and trifecta tickets. He previously covered racing for the San Francisco Examiner, Thoroughbred Times and NBCSports.com.
He passes the tests of time served, reasoning and independence. Be clear about his territory, though. His expertise is American racing, much of it on dirt and bet through pari-mutuel pools, and it does not transfer to a wet Wednesday at Wolverhampton. Read him on the Review-Journal and LinkedIn.
Racing tipsters you can trust, and the red flags of those you can’t
- A big winner and no ledger. One 50-1 shot proves nothing. Ask for every tip, losers included.
- A strike rate with no prices. Picking winners 40% of the time is worthless if they were all odds-on. Profit figures should say whether bets were settled at starting price or the advised price, and to what stake.
- Guarantees and “inside information”. The advertising rules say tipsters must not suggest success is guaranteed. Anyone who does is telling you something about themselves.
- Pressure to stake more. Staking plans that raise bets after a loss can empty an account quickly.
- Silence about money. If a site does not say whether bookmakers pay it, assume they do.
Where Bets & Horses fits in: an AI predictor that shows its working
We are not a tipping service, and our AI racing predictor is not one either. For every British race today and tomorrow, it turns the best bookmaker prices and the form into a chance for each runner, then marks good bets and the horses to avoid, with the reasons alongside: the price, recent runs, the trainer’s strike rate, course and distance form.
It shows its working so that you can disagree with it, the same test we have applied to everyone here. It does not promise profit, and nothing that does deserves your trust. Use it alongside our daily racing tips, and if you want to know how machine predictions compare with human judgement, read our guide to AI betting prediction tools.
Horse racing tipster FAQs
Who is the best horse racing tipster in the UK?
There is no single answer, because the best tipster depends on how you measure it. On a long, public record, Tom Segal’s Pricewise column in the Racing Post is the benchmark. For independent proofing, look at the Racing Post naps table and Press Challenge, which settle newspaper tips to a £1 level stake.
Are horse racing tipsters worth paying for?
Only if they can show an independently proofed record, logged before each race at prices you could have taken. If a paid service will not show you every past tip, losers included, keep your money.
How do I check whether a tipster is proofed?
Ask who records the tips, when, and at what price. A proper proofing service logs each tip before the race and settles it independently.
What is a nap in horse racing?
A nap is a tipster’s most confident selection of the day. Newspaper naps are tracked in tables such as the Racing Post naps table, which settles each one to a £1 stake at starting price.
Do newspaper racing tipsters make a profit?
Over every race, most do not: newspaper tipsters must pick a horse in each race the night before. The best naps tipsters show a profit in some seasons, but few manage it year after year.
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