Despite the fact that there is no named author behind the selections from Tipsmart – a tipping service for horse racing – the service as a whole seemed professionally presented, hype-free, transparent and therefore very intriguing.
A good tipping service provides horses that aren’t the favourites but have good odds and an outside chance of winning. The ethos of Tipsmart is along these lines accordingly.
They aim ‘to provide selections that we believe to be generally underestimated by bookmakers and traditional form students. Tipsmart maintain that this then (hopefully) results in large winnings when the bets go your way. They state that you’re not going to have winning bets every day, but by following their selections over a period of time, the idea is that ‘You will make substantial profits’; ‘You will be on massive priced winners’; and ‘You will be privy to some big gambles before they develop.’
Subscription costs for Tipsmart are on the very affordable end, which is the other thing that raised my interest. Three months costs £49.95 but if you do not want to commit yourself for so long you have the option of paying £9.95 for one week or £19.95 for one month. As with most tipping services, there is no money back guarantee.
Once a member, you receive three tips daily, sent to your inbox or made available on the members’ area of the Tipsmart website. There is also an option to have the tips texted to you, but this costs £1.50 per text. The advantage of this is that some of the bets make the most of early morning starting prices, which you’ll definitely want to match, but being as most people receive emails on their phones nowadays anyway, the text option is somewhat redundant and a mere money-maker for Tipsmart.
The selections are win bets, with a level staking plan advised (no loss-chasing here, thankfully). Their tips certainly do cater to the higher-priced runners, which felt strangely bold when I came to action them. I found myself wondering just exactly who the team at Tipsmart were and why they’ve opted to select certain horses. Nothing is ever really told about their selection process, which sometimes caused me concern.
Less secretive is their provision of past results – something that a surprising amount of tipsters neglect to offer. Being transparent with results is what I always look for in a tipping service and was pleased that Tipsmart’s results are published every month on their website. Overall, since beginning in 2009, they’re reportedly in profit by 794.3 points (based on early morning prices) and 683.10 (based on Betfair starting prices. Their overall strike-rate is a shockingly low 14%, which speaks volumes about the kinds of odds the few winning horses have.
In my two month trial, there were 185 selections, with odds ranging from 4/1 at the lower end of the scale, to 24/1 at the upper end. This is a far cry from merely backing the favourites. Out of the 185 bets, there were only 21 winners, which gave me a strike-rate of 11.35%. You get used to loss after loss with this service, and the combined winnings, though they were at relatively high odds, just weren’t enough to warrant a profit in this instance, with my final bank standing at minus 24 points.
There were some near-misses, with quite a few of the selected runners coming in second or a very tight third, meaning that if those horses had won then I would probably be in profit. I think that with Tipsmart, luck plays a much larger role than with other tipping services. This may go some way to explaining why Tipsmart reports profits in many months of the past year – by as much as 66 points in April 2012.
I’m not totally convinced by Tipsmart but nor am I going to lambaste it. It has the potential to create profit (and its published results suggest it has done so) but for me there was too much reliance on those few and far between high-priced winners providing the results we want. With three selections a day, and 89% of them cumulatively being losses, it would require absolute belief to continue with this system. With this in mind it’s a blessing that the subscription fee is relatively good value for money.
