Tag: Horse racing

Oddschecker.com is it really worth paying for a subscription to have a bet?

Next week is the Cheltenham horse racing festival in the UK – it is the BIG celebration of horse racing in the UK and for those that enjoy watching horse racing and having a punt and putting a bet on that is the week to do it. But there are so many horses at so many different odd to bet on that it’s very easy to not know which horses to bet on and see who will win or who will lose.

There are websites out there that have people that recommend the horses that they think are most likely to win on the day of each race, but even when you follow the tip of a good tipster there is no guarantee that any horse they say might win a race will win. The Cheltenham festival is a week when if I try to have a bet I make sure I set a limit to how much I bet because chances are I will lose most bets and it is likely I will lose money and so it’s important to only bet what I can afford on my budget to lose. Betting should really be looked at by me as a bit of fun, a challenge a gamble and not in a any way a way of making money or profiting from.

I tend to place 1 or 2 £3 bets on four horse known as a lucky 15, 10 pence each way bet, each day during the Cheltenham festival and use sites such as Oddschecker.com to help me decide which horse to bet on. Last March in the week before the Cheltenham festival the Oddschecker.com website started charging people £10 to view all the tips on it’s website concerning which horses to bet on. This was incredibly annoying at the time as this service has been free for years with tipsters such as Andy Holding recommending which horses to back during the Cheltenham festival. I kind of assumed and hoped the site would always be free to view tips on.

So to start charging the week before the the Cheltenham horse racing gold cup festival seemed really harsh back in 2024 but I though £10 a month to pay to see what horses Andy Holding recommended was not too bad. So I paid my money and took my chances and placed my bets. I don’t remember if I won or lost last year which meant I did not have a big win but likely did not loose that much either and probably broke even betting for the fun of it and not for the win.

Well it’s now Sunday 8th March 2025 and my subscription to get bets for £10 a month has just today stopped working suddenly even though I’m still paying Oddschecker.com my subscription of £10 a month for what now appears to be a complete waste of money and no tips. Oddsecher.com are now asking for a subscription charge of £34.99 per month for what was once £10 if I still want to get tips from Andy Holding for next week’s Cheltenham festival, which does feel extortionate.

Considering I normally only spend £3.00 to £6.00 a day on bets and there now asking me to pay an extra £34.99 a month to see tips so as to be able to place a bet. It feels like an excessive rip off and out of my budget and will not increase the amount of winners I back if I start paying £34.99 for a subscription tipping service that was recently completely free. I would like to cancel my subscription of £10 month but they also offered me a share in  a horse called Unknown Journey so I am going to decide later whether to cancel my current subscription of £10 a month for what now is just for a share in the owning of a horse with no horse racing tips with it and the tips were my main reason for agreeing to a subscription in the first place.

There are other sites to consider in order to be able to gain tips from tipsters that are good at picking horses that sometime win. The best site that is still free for tips is attheraces.com Hugh Taylor is a person I follow on this website that offers good tips but there are disadvantages to following his tips. Firstly he does not always have tips every day and also when he backs a horse the odds then narrow and so you don’t always get good odds on the horses that he backs because lots of other people are tipping the horse too, so you don’t get good odds on the horses he chooses and just because the odds are lowered does not increase the chances of a horse winning. On the attheraces.com  website there is also Lawrence Taylor’s speed ratings tips and I like theses as these are six good tips  everyday on race horses that he recommends to put a bet on, but one downside is you do not know what the odds are on the page and have to go to a new page to look up the odds for betting on his choice of horses.  

If you are able or willing to want to pay for tips then there is also another Andy Holding website that is expensive it’s called andyholdingspeedfigures.co.uk and costs £39 per month to see the horse he recommends placing bets on. To be honest I signed up years ago on a trial discount rate for Cheltenham week festival tips and it looked and felt like they overly gave you lots of stats about horses to back but the site was very confusing and complicated and did not help me know which horse to pick to place a bet on. It’s too expensive for me to have a yearly subscription but I am tempted to try it for a month when the Cheltenham Gold cup week takes place and just see what the site looks like now.

My final thoughts are if you have an addictive personality, a small income or gamble money that you cannot afford to lose, please just don’t do it. Betting on the horses is no way to make, earn or win money. Know your limits and if you not betting to play a game or you try to chase money you have lost or need it’s potentially dangerous and just not worth it.

I bet you don’t make money or win a lot but the fun of watching the races and betting small amounts on bets you can afford to lose is a lot of fun. I don’t think the paid sites are worth there subscription fees and just because you pay a company website to tell you which horse to place a bet on does not guarantee that a horse will win. Best of luck though whatever you do.

Jockeys, horses, Police & Protestors – The Grand National 2023

Today was the 175th Grand National horse race at Aintree, I know I am old because I still enjoy and support the running of this horse race. One horse sadly died during the race and 118 people were arrested who attempted to stop the race from going ahead. I did not enjoy the actual race this year as I was quite fearful of the risk to jockeys, horses, protestors and police had a protestor tried to take matters into their own hands and run on the course in an attempt to stop it during the running of the race. This would have been a sad and sickly sight with potential fatalities’ that would make news all around the world all for the wrong reason.  

Protestors at this years race

These protestors have decided they are hell bent now and at future race meetings aiming to stop this event by breaking in to the event on mass and trying to chain themselves to race course jumps fences in order to prevent the event from going ahead. We live in a democracy where we can without harm to ourselves or others say and do what we like. But we should not and cannot aim to inflict or forcefully implement our views onto others.

If the law makers that we vote in decided that something is wrong, immoral or cruel and we need to stop doing it,  then the legal process to stop doing the said event or activity is there and would result in something that the people as a majority do not want to happen to stop. But in no democracy should the will of a few be forced onto the many. To my mind when you say people no longer have a freedom of choice your moving swiftly into the realms of a form of fascism and totalitarianism, where you are not free to think or do things for yourself because someone else is telling you how to think and what to do and I am very strongly opposed to that kind of control, without dam good reason.

There are reasons that I can think of where people’s rights to do something should be restricted and the majority of the population did agree in this country with that restriction and that time was with gun control legislation. It is one of the greatest successes in legislation in the UK to my mind because of how many lives have potentially been saved.

But there are things that I still think we have a choice to do such as eat a beef burger or watch a horse race. Some people are passionate about the idea that I have no right to eat certain animal and fish based foods and I am also no longer able to watch horses racing at Aintree. If a utopian view of veganism was adopted overnight I would dread to see what a vegan Britain would look like and also how the vegan police would enforce and prosecute those that broke the new vegan based societal rules.

Also if animals in the countryside were no longer being farmed for their meat does this mean that there would no longer be profit or a point in looking after any domesticated animals in the countryside. What would be the point of keeping an unmilked cow or an unprofitable pig. The domesticated animal market would be dead overnight if a vegan utopia was adopted. Would we also be arresting and jailing those that continue to trying to eat meat or race horses over fences.

Well we could reintroduce rewilding which I am a huge believer in and I worked for a charity called Moor Trees as a Trustee for a number of years that works towards the rewilding of Dartmoor to a woodland and more natural environment, this is a wonderful concept and one which for many areas of the world I fully support. But a wild environment is no utopia in itself, its wild, no vets and pretty bleak and brutal at times. The natural environment is a wonder awe-inspiring place but there is no such thing as a clean death in nature or a wonderful life in the wild.

A wild environment is not some giant entertainment centre for a vegan to play and populate the planet from. Its wild, brutal and potential deadly environment to live, survive and thrive within. The domestication of plant and animal life has happened over thousands of years for very good reason. Because a wild natural environment is a brutal and repressive place to live it’s no Disney movie or fantasy play ground and often this is ignored or overlooked by vegan society advocates. You have more chance of being a happy, safe and sheltered vegan by being plugged into a computer and playing on your favourite games than you do by being at one with a completely wild environment.

Whose Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses – U2