Tipsters, that's what.  "Sounds like the pot calling the Kettle Black" I hear you say - Wrong - although Ivor Donkey is a tipster, there is one major difference, I do not not demand any recompense for my service.

Which is more than can be said for all of the other tipping services that advertise every week.   We've all seen the adverts, littered with superlatives like "Steering Job" or "Good Thing", or the old chestnut "My Secret Contact is having his biggest ever bet".

What an absolute load of Bullshit, they don't know any more than the rest of us.  For a start, you can't trust these gallop watchers (see the Garbage from the Gallops page for proof of this statement), they don't know their arses from their elbows, a herd of camels could run across Newmarket Heath and they wouldn't notice the difference.

If I had a pound for every time one of these morons has written to me I could give up work tomorrow.  For instance, I recently received a leaflet telling me that if a certain horse didn't win a race at Newmarket the following Saturday, that I could have a years worth of his monthly newsletter for £10.  Needless to say, the horse in question was beaten out of sight, and I'm expected to pay £10 for a years worth of crap information like that - do me a favour !

Another "offer" that I often receive is the one where I'm required to invest a certain amount of money (usually  £25), on the tipster's behalf and send him the winnings as payment, and naturally I can invest as much of my own money as I see fit.  The reason given for this "arrangement" is usually that "I've won so much money in the past that my bookmaker will no longer accommodate my bets and has closed  my account" - Bullshit ! - the real reason is that these people are such inept tipsters that they are scared to show their faces in their local betting shop due to embarrassment, as they've backed so many donkeys in the past and lost a fortune.

The most despicable ones of the lot though are undoubtedly the telephone tipsters.  The adverts appear in the racing post every day without fail "Massive Stable Gamble - absolutely flying on the gallops".  The telephone number is always an 0898 premium rate number, which is at least 50p a minute.  So by the time they've finished bullshitting you for ten minutes or so, and finally get around to giving you the tip, your phone bill has gone through the roof, and to add insult to injury, the odds on "Steering Job" finishes absolutely stone bonking last and you lose even more money.

The adverts for these "services" always make out that the tipster has access to inside information.  It's always an ex-jockey, ex-trainer or an ex-stable lad, when in fact all they are is ex-pensive.

I'm always highly sceptical about this so called inside information, it's all very well saying that a horse has been "laid out" for a particular race, but who's to say that any number of other stables in the race don't have the same idea for their representative, they can't all win can they?

I'll bet that if you rang half a dozen of these jokers on a Saturday morning you'd get at least two or three different selections in the same race, all supposedly "laid out" for it.  That may well be the case, but which one do you back?  None of them would be my advice, because the horse doesn't know that it's been laid out, and how many times have these huge gambles come unstuck.

If you really need help finding winners (and I assume that you do as you're reading this web site), the best option is either Timeform or Raceform.  Instead of tips, they supply you with ratings for every horse that is running on a particular day, and the conditions in which the ratings were achieved, enabling you to select the highest rated horse over the trip and going of the race in which it is running.  Their ratings are based on what each horse has achieved on the racecourse and Nothing Else.  You won't ever find them using expressions like "Massive Steering Job", which is a recommendation in itself I think you'll agree.  Pricewise in the Racing Post is excellent also, and it's free (apart from the cost of the paper obviously).

In conclusion, I'm sure that there are some tipsters out there who make consistent profits, but they are in the minority, in the main I think you'll find that most of them are w*****s.