I'd played lots of card games, but never in my life had I played poker. Unlike many of the other card games that relied largely on luck depending on what you were dealt, I could clearly see that poker was much more of a skill game than luck orientated. It might not have been a game that we ever played back in the day, but after a bit of Googling, book-reading, and video-watching, I quickly got the hang of it. I soon signed up to a poker-affiliate site so I could get rake-back — a percentage of the 10% rake you paid into the site for each game (I think it was about 35% rake-back).

That meant the more games you played, the more rake-back you earned. If you played enough, you didn’t even need to win at poker to make a profit!

Before long, I’d become pretty decent, playing up to 16 Sit & Go games at once across two screens! It was full-on, but as long as you knew the odds for each situation at the table, you knew instantly whether to call or fold 90% of the time, and the other 10% never really mattered as you never needed to win all the time as your rake-back was always enough to pay you a healthy wage.

I did that for around two years, and it was good while it lasted — but like all repetitive things, it eventually got boring. Very boring. So I jacked it in.

Form Studying

During the Oddschecker days, I got more and more into studying form. It started out of pure curiosity — I wanted to know why certain horses were being backed so heavily.

A lot of the time, it turned out to be stable touches, and the real reason behind the money was rarely clear. But as my own bets became harder to place (thanks to restrictions), I started thinking — if I can’t back these horses anymore, that doesn’t mean other people can’t!

So I began studying form properly, watching hours of race replays to build a list of horses that had been unlucky, ran on the wrong ground, drawn badly, or had jockeys that maybe didn’t try too hard last time out.

That curiosity turned into something much bigger.

My First Racing Service

The first racing service I started was back in 2012, and it was called “Steameralert.” It was based entirely around what I’d been doing on Oddschecker.

In hindsight, I probably should’ve kept the source a secret and pretended it was just a standard tipping service with me doing all the finding. But I’ve always been too honest for my own good — and I actually wanted people to see what I was doing, so they too could fleece the bookies!

It worked, but never quite like it did in the early years, and Steameralert didn’t last too long.

Then, around July 2014, I launched my first proper tipping service — through the guys at Betting School — and called it “Bookies Enemy No1.”

The name came naturally, because that’s exactly who I thought I was at the time!

After that, I moved around a bit — Tipstrr, Betting Gods — before building the independent service I run today.

And now, here I am — 13 years later, still going strong, still beating the bookies, and still doing what I love.

Why I love it.

There's no bigger thrill for me than studying a race (or races) for several hours and finding the winner, which is maybe why I've lasted so long in the turbulent and highly stressful world of horse racing tipping.

It's just such a good feeling knowing that you've beaten the bookie, and all that hard work and 'puzzle solving' has paid off, and what's even more satisfying is when you've selected a horse, watched the price of the horse drift right out as no one else fancies it but you, and then still wins, as going against grain, swimming upstream when everyone else is swimming downstream, zigging when everyone else is zagging, it gives you such a victorious feeling knowing you were right about the horse and all the bookies and other punters were wrong.

But even more than beating the bookies, what I find the most satisfying is knowing that I've won my members a whole bunch of money, the thrill that gives me is just immense!

Knowing that me, and my members have taken a few hundred grand from the bookies in any given day just brings me so much pleasure.

👉 Next chapter: Keeping The Dream Alive