Horse Racing NAP of the Day: What It Means and How Tipsters Pick Theirs

A NAP Is a Tipster’s Strongest Conviction — Here Is How to Judge It

Every morning during the jumps season, I open three newspaper tipping columns before the kettle has boiled. Each one carries a NAP — the tipster’s best bet of the day — and more often than not, all three are different horses in different races. That single fact tells you everything about why blindly following a NAP is a losing strategy, and why understanding how they are chosen gives you a genuine edge.

A NAP represents maximum confidence. When a tipster puts a selection forward as their NAP, they are staking their reputation on it more than any other pick that day. In the old Fleet Street tradition, the word itself comes from the card game Napoleon, where calling “nap” means going for all five tricks — the highest possible bid. The modern racing equivalent carries the same weight: this is the one I believe in most.

The problem is that confidence and accuracy are not the same thing. During the peak festival months — April through July, when UK racing participation hits around 7% of adults — NAP tables swell with selections. Tipsters compete publicly, their records published weekly, and the pressure to maintain a strike rate pushes some towards short-priced favourites that win often but return little. Others swing for bigger prices, accepting a lower hit rate for higher returns when they land. Knowing which approach a tipster favours, and whether it suits your own betting style, is the difference between using NAPs profitably and just adding noise to your betting day.

NAP and NB: Origins and Modern Usage

I spent an afternoon in the British Newspaper Library a few years back, tracing the earliest NAP tables I could find. The format has barely changed in half a century: a grid listing every newspaper tipster, their NAP and their NB (next best), with a running tally of winners and profit or loss to level stakes. It is one of the most transparent accountability systems in any form of media tipping, and it exists because editors realised decades ago that readers wanted proof, not promises.

The NAP is always a single selection — one horse, one race, one clear statement of conviction. The NB sits just below it in the tipster’s confidence ranking. Some columns add a third tier, a “longshot” or “dark horse” pick, but the NAP and NB are the core pair. In competitive tipping tables, only the NAP counts toward the headline standings, which is why tipsters guard the selection carefully.

Modern usage has stretched the terminology. Social media tipsters often label their “best bet” as a NAP without any of the accountability structures that newspapers enforce. There is no published running total, no end-of-season audit, no editor checking the record. The word still signals conviction, but the verification layer is missing. That matters, because a NAP without a track record is just an opinion with a louder label.

In the professional tipping community, NAP tables remain the gold standard. The Racing Post’s naps table, for instance, tracks dozens of newspaper tipsters across every day of the season. The data is public, the methodology is consistent — level stakes to the advised price — and the results are updated daily. If you are going to follow NAPs, starting with a verified table rather than an anonymous social media account removes most of the risk of following someone who selectively reports their winners.

How to Evaluate a NAP Before You Follow It

A friend of mine followed a tipster’s NAP every day for three months last winter without checking a single figure. He backed 74 horses, had 18 winners, and finished the period down 12 points to level stakes. The tipster, meanwhile, was advertising a “24% strike rate” — which was technically accurate but meaningless without the profit figure. Strike rate without ROI is a half-truth, and half-truths cost money.

The first thing I check is long-term profit to level stakes. A tipster whose NAPs show a positive return over 300 or more selections is demonstrating genuine skill — or at least a sustainable method. Below 200 selections, variance is too high to draw conclusions. A hot streak of 50 winners means nothing if the next 50 bring it all back to level.

The second filter is average odds. A tipster who NAPs exclusively at 1/2 and 4/7 will show a high strike rate but struggle to generate profit because the margin for error is tiny — one loser wipes out multiple winners. Conversely, a tipster whose average NAP price is 8/1 will have long losing runs punctuated by big-priced winners. Neither approach is inherently better, but you need to know which one you are following so you can set realistic expectations for drawdown and recovery time.

Seasonal patterns matter too. Participation in horse racing betting fluctuates sharply across the calendar — peaking during Cheltenham and the Grand National, dropping to around 4% in the quieter autumn months. Some tipsters excel during the big-field handicaps of the spring but struggle with small-field conditions races in midsummer. Checking whether a tipster’s record holds up across different phases of the season reveals whether their method is robust or weather-dependent.

Finally, I look at how the NAP is justified. A bare selection — “2:30 Kempton, Horse X” — tells me nothing about the reasoning. A NAP accompanied by a paragraph explaining why the horse fits the race conditions, why the price is too big, and what the risk factors are gives me enough information to form my own view. I am not looking for the tipster to do my thinking; I am looking for them to show theirs.

NAP Tables and Public Records: Where to Find Them

The single best resource for NAP accountability is the daily naps table published by the Racing Post. It aggregates selections from national newspaper tipsters, applies a uniform staking method, and publishes cumulative profit/loss figures. The table runs year-round, covering Flat and National Hunt, and the season-end standings give a clear picture of who delivered and who did not.

Attheraces.com runs a similar competition, tracking its own panel of tipsters alongside user-submitted selections. The format is slightly different — tipsters can pick more than one race per day — but the NAP element is preserved, and the leaderboard is transparent. UK racing attendance reached 5.031 million in 2026, the highest since 2019, and that growth has been mirrored by a growth in tipping platforms competing for punters’ attention.

OLBG operates a community-driven tipping competition where members submit selections daily and are ranked by profit over thousands of tips. The volume of data makes it harder for lucky streaks to distort the standings, and the top-ranked tipsters tend to show genuine consistency rather than a single good month. The downside is the sheer number of contributors — filtering signal from noise requires patience.

For social media tipsters, the accountability problem is harder to solve. Some use third-party proofing services that verify selections at the time they are posted, making it impossible to edit or delete losing picks retroactively. If a tipster you follow on social media does not use any form of independent proofing, treat their record with scepticism. The ones who do proof their tips are usually happy to share the link — it is a competitive advantage in a crowded market.

My own approach is to maintain a shortlist of three or four tipsters whose NAPs I track in a simple spreadsheet. I do not follow every selection blindly. Instead, I use their picks as a starting point for my own research: if a tipster I respect NAPs a horse in a race I had not considered, I look at the form myself and decide independently. The NAP acts as a filter, narrowing the day’s card to a manageable number of races worth studying in depth. For a broader framework on assessing tipping quality, the guide to evaluating free tipster sites covers the red flags and verification methods in more detail.

When a NAP Fits Your Betting and When It Does Not

Not every NAP belongs in every punter’s portfolio. A tipster who specialises in National Hunt handicaps is producing selections suited to a specific market — following their NAPs during the Flat season, when they switch to a code they cover less deeply, dilutes the edge. I learned this the hard way by following a jumps specialist through a summer of all-weather cards and watching my bank shrink steadily for three months.

The best use of NAPs, in my experience, is as a supplement to your own analysis rather than a replacement for it. If I have studied a race and arrived at a shortlist of two or three possible bets, seeing that a respected tipster has NAP-ed one of them adds a layer of confirmation. It does not guarantee anything, but it tells me that someone else, working independently, has reached a similar conclusion. That convergence of opinion is more valuable than either view alone.

Where NAPs become dangerous is when they replace thought entirely. Following five different tipsters’ NAPs every day means backing five horses a day with no personal conviction behind any of them. Over a month, that is 150 bets placed on someone else’s judgment, with no mechanism for adjusting stakes, skipping races you do not understand, or walking away on days when the card offers nothing. The NAP is a tool. Like any tool, it works best when handled by someone who understands what it is for and when to put it down.