EVEN though the flat season was shortened significantly this summer, it felt terribly long in recent months to The Irish Field’s British racing tipster Rory Delargy, who was crowned Racing Post naps competition champion last Saturday, netting himself the first prize of £4,000.

Delargy, who previews and provides tips for the main British racing action every Saturday in this paper, top and tailed his season with two huge 40/1 winning naps, the second of which was Majestic Dawn, whose win in the Cambridgeshire was also pre-advised to The Irish Field readers.

“It was a little stressful alright,” Delargy admits. “I got off to a great start with a 40/1 winner at Nottingham, a filly called Ishvara, and from then I was top of the table. It’s great to see your name there but you feel a little pressure then because you’re protecting a lead.

“Karl Hedley got very close to and he actually went ahead of me briefly one day towards the end of August. I remember the day before people were telling me I was home and hosed and then Karl had a 25/1 winner. He led for about an hour and a half and then I had 6/1 winner. It was a right old battle for a while.

“Even on the last day, you’re always worried someone will be able to find a 100/1 shot and actually two people did manage to find a horse that drifted out to 150/1 in the Champions Sprint – so I had to have 20 quid on both of them!”

Amazingly, Rory’s final total of £116.21 profit is the largest ever recorded on the naps table. He finished just over £75 clear of his nearest pursuer. Any tipster will tell you that providing any sort of profit when restricted to just starting prices is very difficult. But having to provide your nap before 5pm the previous day is even more challenging.

“It’s very easy to find 20/1 or 25/1 shots that shouldn’t be that big the night before,” Rory explains. “I’ll know that they’re too big and that most people will see that and they’ll get punted. It’s easy to tip a horse that’s 16/1 or 20/1 the night before and they end up going off 6/1.

“The challenge is making sure that the price isn’t going to collapse because you’re getting judged at SP. So I try to work out which horse is going to be underbet on the day.

“If you’re looking at a big race and you see a horse who is trained by someone unfashionable and ran badly last time out, they’re good reasons why people won’t want to back it and that lends itself to the price holding up.”

Antrim

Delargy, a Co Antrim native, moved to Scotland at a young age and studied at the University of Edinburgh before moving to London to work in a variety of roles which included teaching in a preparatory school, working in travel agents, working for the civil service, working as betting shop manager with Ladbrokes and then moving to their head office as an operations manager.

He operated as professional punter for two years before moving towards the media, and besides The Irish Field, he writes and tips for a number of other publications now, while he also appears as a pundit on Sky Sports Racing and on various popular racing podcasts.

So what all this experience, what’s his advice to the everyday punter?

“The best advice I’ve read, I can’t even recall who gave it. I think it may have been a trainer to his son and he gave it to him in yearly installments… The first part was never have a bet, the second part was if you’re going to bet – bet big and the third part was if you must have a bet – make sure it’s a big price.

“Now I’d never encourage anyone to bet big! But basically it’s a lot more dangerous having a series of small bets at short odds without really engaging your brain then it is to just concentrate on the bet you really like and have one bet on that, rather than think you’re being sensible and betting in much smaller stakes, but on things you don’t really fancy.

“There is also no substitute for watching racing and don’t read other people’s opinions until you’ve formed your own. That’s a bizarre thing to say but if you can’t watch a race you’re relying on other people to tell you how it went and who the best horses were.

“If you can watch a race and you think Horse A should have won and everyone else says it shouldn’t, have faith in your own opinion. The experts get it wrong all the time and that’s where I tend to find value. I look at a race and think this horse only finished sixth and I thought he went really well and I want to back him next time out but I might read the race report and it says the horse in sixth was very disappointing and should have run better than that. It won’t put me off.”

The betting industry has changed a lot since Rory began working in it but he accepts that account restrictions and bets getting knocked back are just a reality of how bookmakers behave. He is less forgiving about bookmakers’ behaviour with regard to customer service and how certain bets are handled.

He explains: “The level of customer service in bookmakers these days is very disappointing. If you back a horse ante-post and your horse gets balloted out, you’re almost certain to have to argue your case to get your money back. It’s bonkers because it’s a perfectly obvious rule that every bookmaker has – if you back ante-post, and the horse is balloted out, the stakes are refunded. Every single bookmaker in the country it seems still goes to this default of telling you your bet has lost. You will almost have to threaten them with legal action before they’ll say ‘oh yes we’ve just found the rule that says you’ll get your money back’ and I think that’s disgraceful.

“Generally speaking people say that’s dishonest but I think bookmakers are more than happy to have poor training for customer service staff and the idea is that you’re going to get lots of dubious complaints or people just having a moan, and you have an army of barely trained people to deal with that.

“I’ve had a few disputes over the years and it’s taken ages to get them sorted. Sometimes I’ve been able to reach a PR guy through Twitter and then invariably it gets sorted but he ordinary guy on the street can’t do that – they have to stand at the counter in a betting shop or go on to a chat line and say this isn’t a losing bet and all they got told is that it is.

“That annoys me more than getting restricted which is just a reality these days.”

Back to the nap table, with the slates wiped clean, Rory finds himself all the way back in 46th place through the early skirmishes, so it’s a case of starting all over again. But whatever happens, he has a win in the competition to his name.

“Well don’t get me wrong, I won’t be having ‘champion tipster’ engraved on my grave stone or anything!” he says laughing. “But of course it’s a nice achievement. The competition goes on for a fair while and you’re up against all the other newspaper tipsters – there is 54 of us there and that is as big as it’s been.

“And at least now if anyone says ‘ah this fella doesn’t know what he’s talking about’, I can point back to 2020 and say I won the naps table.”

You can read Rory’s tipping advice for all the top British action today on page 62