The Gambling Don is a tipster service provided by BetFan. I remember when this service was released in 2012 with a great fanfare and if I remember rightly it was in the early days of Betfan being set up as a portal for tipping services. The sales page has lost none of its original glitz from back then. It is claimed that “The Gambling Don” has been sucking cash from the Bookies for over 20 years, thanks to his network of inside contacts.
Here’s the link to the webpage advertising this service
His tips certainly got off to a good start in July/August 2012 and generally continued well for over two years. But from the graph below you can see that in the past year, the results have not been so good.
In the small print on their “proofing” page it is confirmed that these results reported by Betfan are to advised stakes and at Best Odds Guaranteed odds. Some advice is for a single win bet and some for EachWay bets, with the advised stakes being anywhere from 3 to 5 points for win bets and 1 or 2 points for EachWay bets.
Out own proofing at RaceAdvisor.co.uk produce similar figures for Advised stakes at Bookie Best Odds Guaranteed. We have been monitoring the results of the Gambling Don since the end of August 2012. Initially I always like to evaluate results by flat-rate stakes at SP and under this criteria, the results are not so good. Here again you can also see that the last year has not been successful. But for the first two years the P/L at SP held its own.
But this is only to flat stakes at Starting Prices. From the table below you can see that better results were obtained by getting better odds.
| SP | Betfair SP | Advised Odds | BOG | ||||||||
| Flat Stakes £1 | -£224 | -7% | -£19 | -1% | £124 | 4% | £259 | 8% | |||
And if we take into account using the stakes advised by The Gambling Don, we clearly get better results:
| SP | Betfair SP | Advised Odds | BOG | ||||||||
| Advised Stakes | -£1,097 | -8% | -£188 | -1% | £610 | 4% | £1,195 | 28% | |||
Given that the advised stakes are quite variable, I checked what would have happened if £5 flat stakes had been used.
| SP | Betfair SP | Advised Odds | BOG | ||||||||
| Profit | ROI | Profit | ROI | Profit | ROI | Profit | ROI | ||||
| Flat Stakes £5 | -£1,120 | -7% | -£95 | -1% | £620 | 4% | £1,295 | 8% | |||
Although the profit figure for Best Odds Guaranteed is about the same, you can see the Return On Investment (ROI) figures are significantly higher using Advised Stakes. In other words less money, in total, would have been put down in order to make more than £1,000 profit.
So the advice is quite clear: Upon receiving the tips, get the best price you can, as close to the Advised Odds as possible from a BOG bookmaker.
Three subscription deals are available, Bronze (£58 per 28 days), Silver (£130 every 90 days) & Gold (199 per six months). These prices are subject to an additional 20% vat. The advice is sent by Email, although the sales page does not say at what time of day the info is sent.
Taking these subscription charges into account, it is clear you would need to be placing significantly more than 1 pound per point of the advised stakes. That is you would need to be placing maybe £10 per point (£20 to £50 bets in total). If you had done this, your profit at BOG would have been some £11,000 minus about £1,200 for your subscriptions over the three years of these results.
So that is quite a respectable return, so long as you can get close to the advised odds with a BOG Bookie.
Like all such services and systems, patience is needed and losing runs have to be accepted. Only you can say if you would have persisted with the tips over the past year for little or no gain. The longest losing run was 20 bets in May 2015. But over the three year period a good return could have been gained with BOG Bookmakers, with the distinct proviso that you must get near the Advised Odds. You also need to realise that with this and most claimed results for tipsters, the Rule 4 deductions from withdrawn horses is not reported. As the advice is given early in the day, there are inevitably withdrawals, affecting the odds. Ideally we need a tipster service that produces a profit to SP or Betfair SP.
Because of the narrow window of profitability I can’t give “The Gambling Don” a wholehearted endorsement but he does seem to have the knack of advising value bets so long as you can get the value odds.
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