I recently watched a youtube video by Caan Berry, who, quite accurately, put forward a case for not backing online tipsters as the odds very quickly diminished as soon as or even before the tip was published online. Conspiracy theorists would have you believe that there may be some collusion between tipsters and bookies that would enable bookies to make a bigger margin on the tips that lose and perhaps cutting the online platform that published them a bigger affiliate payout. There is no doubt that odds do disappear very quickly but in the bigger picture of racing as a whole to keep the odds low on a horse just because a tipster tipped that horse could prove very expensive for bookies if another horse with better ability and was being backed towards the start of the race stayed at the bigger odds and went on to win. Bookies are scaredy cats, money going onto other horses will lower their odds, its a fact!
It is true that if a tipster has a big and loyal following then those punters will undoubtably blind bet on the selection for fear of the odds dropping even more, this is bonanza time for the bookies. They take pots of cash at crap odds on a horse trying not to split their sides laughing at all the punters doing their bank blindly. What is a little more concerning is that on some bookies sites “Best Odds Guaranteed” doesn’t kick in until an hour or more after the tip is published so they don’t have to payout at the bigger price if the odds drift.
That’s the conspiracy part over now I will look at some facts and as Caan Berry singled out Hugh Taylor of At The Races Website I will look at his results from April 2024 (His latest complete results available).
In April Hugh Taylor had 65 tips in total claiming a 30.09 point profit for the month at advised odds and stakes. Of these 65 tips 3 were E/W tips and for the purposes of this post I am going to discount them as I personally rarely back E/W bets. Many of you reading this may disagree, this is your choice and you could apply the same staking method that I will outline in this post to all of his tips, that is your own personal possible course of action.
The purpose of this post is not to condemn any one party whether it is Taylor himself the website for misleading information or the bookies for offering criminal odds, it is to analyze the timings of the tips published and the reaction of the markets to these tips and most importantly what the actual SP of the tip was at the off.
To make this a fair study I am going to stake each tip with a profit if wins of £5.00 on the advised odds, Industry SP and the Betfair exchange SP. I know that the minimum bet on the exchange is now £1.00 and the stakes you will see on many of these selections is way lower than that but these lower stakes are possible if you use software that allows this such as bet angel ( I will put a link to this at the bottom of the post)
To achieve a level profit target figure the calculation is simple.
Stake = Target / (Odds-1)
If we look at Taylors first tip of the month which was Twilight Madness in the 16:05 at Kempton on 1st April he advised odds of 12.0 (11/1) so the stake for this bet would be
Stake = 5 /(12-1) = 45p
Unfortunately I have no way of knowing how far the odds dropped just after tip publication but the horse did go off at the same odds and on the exchange the BSP was 15.67. Figures courtesy of Timeform who publishes these figures for reference purposes)
The horse lost of course (Last actually) so our losses would have been
Tip publication Time (If actually available) -45p
Bookmakers SP -45p
Betfair exchange SP -34p.
As you can see we would be better off by 11p if we had used the excchange to place our bet.
The following excel sheet lists all of Hugh Taylors tips for April except for the E/W bets.
Of the 62 remaining tips after discounting the E/W bets you can see that a total of 15 won and using the staking method outlined above the profit to the advised odds of just £6.01. If we had backed the same horses at the industry S.P. you can see that we would have won nearly twice as much and better yet before commission is taken from the exchange bets three times as much. So, there is a case for backing Taylors tips. He has a strike rate of about 25% but the profits are not breathtaking.
Conclusion.
Hugh Taylors tips are for free, there is no subscription to pay, and if you keep your stakes to a manageable level there is no reason why you shouldnt have a couple of bets each day.
There is however another option – we can lay these tips and then back them just before post time!
We know that the bookies lower the odds just after publication and that perhaps the more savvy amongst us back them on the exchange to get a closer price to advised odds than backing them at the bookmaker. This acts to cause the exchange market to react in the same way as the bookies price lowering and the exchange market starts to reflect the industry prices more closely. If you look at the spreadsheet above you will notice that in most of the tips the exchange S.P. is quite a few ticks higher than even the advised price earlier in the day. This means that there is a possibility of a viable lay to back trade opportunity here.
Follow for his June selections and results
Betornot 