Naps tables: how tipsters are scored
A naps table is a league table for tipsters. Each day every tipster names one selection as their nap, the table records what happened, and across a season it shows who has made money and who has quietly lost it.
Newspapers have published these tables for decades, and most racing sites now run their own. They exist because tipping is easy to talk about and hard to be held to. A table settles the argument.
Level stakes to £1
Almost every naps table scores to level stakes: £1 on every nap, with no extra on the ones the tipster claims to feel strongly about. A winner at 4/1 adds £4, a loser subtracts £1, and after a few hundred bets you have a figure that compares tipsters fairly no matter how confident anyone sounded.
The alternative — letting tipsters vary their stakes — makes the numbers useless for comparison, since a single large bet can rescue a bad season. Level stakes removes that.
Which price gets used
Most tables settle at starting price, the odds at the moment the race begins, rather than the price available when the tip was published. This is stricter than it sounds. A nap from a widely read column often shortens through the morning as readers back it, so the SP is frequently worse than what an early reader could have taken.
A few tables settle at the advised price instead. When you compare two tipsters, check they are being scored the same way, because the gap between early prices and SP is often larger than the gap between the tipsters.
Strike rate and profit measure different things
A naps table usually shows both, and they often point in opposite directions.
| Tipster | Runs | Wins | Strike rate | P/L to £1 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A | 200 | 60 | 30% | −£18 |
| B | 200 | 32 | 16% | +£41 |
Tipster A picks nearly twice as many winners and still loses money, because those winners come at short prices that do not cover the losers. Tipster B is wrong most of the time and finishes well ahead. Profit is the column that matters; strike rate mostly tells you what kind of prices someone likes.
Why the top of the table can mislead
A season contains a few hundred bets, which is not many. One winner at 33/1 can lift a tipster from mid-table to first place, and that result says more about a single afternoon than about a year of judgement.
Look at how the profit was made rather than the total. A tipster who is £40 up from steady returns across the season has shown something different from one who is £40 up because of a single race, even though the table ranks them equally.
Terms used on this page — SP, level stakes, strike rate — are defined in the glossary.