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1. What is the Totesport Ten To Follow?
The Ten-To-Follow (TTF) is an exciting horse racing competition run jointly by the Tote (aka Totesport) and the Racing Post newspaper in the UK. Of all the big-money competitions around, this one is the nearest there is to being a game of skill rather than purely a game of chance. It has aptly been dubbed the "thinking man's lottery".
The Racing Post first introduced the competition way back in 1993. It proved so popular
with the paper's readership, from the start, both home and overseas readers, that the competition has been run twice a
year ever since. There is one competition for the Flat season [which we stopped covering
with our TTF system after a bad rule change in 2004 (since reversed from 2008)], and another much more popular, and more valuable competition
for the Jumps season [which we still cover with our TTF system on this microsite].
From the TTF's early, tentative beginnings, it steadily matured in both finesse and popularity
to a stage whereby the expected prize-money to the winner for a Flat season soon became £100,000+
and, for a Jumps' season, £300,000 or more.
To take part, you need a good knowledge of horse racing yourself or you need a knowledgeable
friend or friends who will team up with you. Without access to racing knowledge there
is absolutely no point entering. You would stand no chance at all - this competition is
not a mindless game like the lottery, bingo or scratchcards.
The first task Ten To Follow contenders have to do is study a large master-list of eligible
horses. The list is published in the Racing Post in April (Flat) and October (Jumps).
The list has progressively got smaller over the years. It was once a whopping 1,000 horses,
then 500, and 250 from 2009. Whatever the size, the master-list has to be whittled down
to a more-manageable shortlist of two to three dozen top-class, and potentially top-class, animals.
This whittling down is one of the key things our system does for you. Once you have a
shortlist, you then have to perm the horses into a number of different lines of ten horses,
and submit your lines using either the postal entry forms provided in the Racing Post or over
the internet. The newspaper, with the help of the Tote, tracks the performance of the
tens of thousands of entries throughout the season, and prints a new leader-board twice a week,
usually on Tuesdays and Fridays. A horse is awarded a number of points every time it wins
a race, the amount varying from 10 through to 50 points, depending on the quality of the race
won, plus bonus points according to the Tote odds of the winner. The ten people whose
lines amass the most points by the end of the competition's run win big prizes. The person
with most points wins the bulk of the prize-money on offer. In addition, there are separate
bonus prizes of £10,000 each month for the leading points' scorer for the month.
And there are two further £10,000 prizes for the leading points' scorers at two top class
Flat meetings at Royal Ascot and York's Ebor Meeting, and £25,000 (up from £10K
in 2009) at the Cheltenham National Hunt Festival. Hence, even if you fall out of contention
for the overall prizes, there are continuing opportunities for the monthly and festival prizes.
The prize money comes from the entry fees which competitors submit with their entries.
More on costs at the end of the next section.
2. How to enter the Tote Ten To Follow. And what it will cost
Entry instructions for the competition are published in the Racing Post, during the run-up to
the start of each new competition i.e. in the months of April (Flat), and October and November
(Jumps).
Entries can be submitted by post or over the internet. Entry by telephone was discontinued
in 2009. Postal entries have traditionally been the standard way to enter.
From the 2005-6 Jumps season, a new rule was introduced which allowed two horses to be changed
halfway through the season. A great idea but, in that first year, it was only available
to telephone and internet entrants. This made it virtually essential to submit entries,
for that season, by the internet (or telephone) or not at all. This unlevel playing field
drove out so many former enthusiasts that the rule was quickly amended for the following 2006-7
Jumps season to permit substitutions for postal entries also. From the 2008 Flat season,
the substitutions rule was changed again to allow players to add two horses for free without
having to take two horses out, the best 10 from 12 counting. That was a fabulous improvement
as it took all the stress and cost out of substitution time.
From 2009, the cost of entering was £12 per line using a Racing Post postal entry form,
or £10 using the Tote website's online form. So, to submit twelve lines by post,
would cost £144. This may seem a lot but, when you consider that it will bring you
lots of fun, enjoyment, excitement and anticipation for the whole length of a racing season,
for just £6.64 a week, it is well worth the cost whether you win or lose. Just for
the record, the costs in the past were: 1993 to 2001-2 £5 per line; 2002 to 2008 £10
per line; 2008-9 £12 per line; 2009 either £12 postal or £10 online per line.
3. Why is the 'tentofollow' Competition so special?
The great attraction of this particular racing competition is that skill, knowledge and experience
count for everything. If you are somebody with those things, or you know somebody else
who is, and you can combine those attributes with inspired judgement, then it is quite feasible
that you could be a future winner. Over the years, the big prizes have been won by all
levels of racing enthusiasts, from trainers' assistants, to form students and unemployed punters.
But, most important, there have been several repeat winners, including people on our own team.
Which goes to show that skill, not just luck, is a significant factor. In fact, one of
our team has so far won over £212,000 in prizes and, later, another of our team was well
on course to collect a similar jackpot when a heartbreaking end-of-season run of eleven seconds
in eleven races robbed him of outright victory, and he had to settle for a 9th-place consolation
prize of only £3,000 in the end. That was before we started to publish our system
online in 2001. Since then, the system has produced ever increasing chances of winning
for a steadily growing band of followers, though none of them had managed to capitalise on the
opportunities until success for several followers finally came in 2007-8.
4. How many horses should you do, what are the odds, how to perm them?
One year, the competition was won by somebody who scribbled out just two lines covering twenty
horses while sitting on the loo. And another year by somebody who did three lines, also
covering twenty horses. However, twenty selections is simply not enough to provide a steady
flow of runners in the critical races. And, if you do not have runners in those races,
when you can see the leaders do, then frustration, boredom and loss of interest soon sets in.
Our early experiences of the competition showed one needs nearer 40 horses than 20 to be reasonably
hopeful of having a runner in most of the critical races. However, one also has to be
aware that the chances of lining up any 10 from forty is mathematically impossible - it's an
enormous 847 million to 1 against. To put that in perspective, the odds of winning the
UK National Lotto (6 numbers from 49) are 'only' 14 million to 1 (and only £1 a line, not £12!).
The strategy employed by our system is a compromise between having enough runners on the one
hand while still hoping to be able to perm them on the other hand. That strategy is to
limit the system's shortlist to never more than 36 horses, less when practicable. The
lowest having been 26 one year. The odds of lining up any 10 from 36 achieves a 70% reduction
in the odds, down to 254 million to 1. Still an impossible number, however, so we
further subdivide the 36 horses into several smaller, separately permable subgroups, which brings
the odds crashing down even further. In fact, in the first few years we were posting the
system online, we succeeded in reducing the initially horrendous odds down to a much more viable
180,000 to 1 against lining up the best ten. Unfortunately, though, later rule changes
in the competition put the Flat version of our system out of action (from 2004 to 2007), and
also forced us to broaden the perming instructions for the Jumps' version in order to still
be in with some sort of reasonable expectancy of trapping a winning combination. Consequently,
the odds of perming any ten horses are now 4 million to 1 for the NH version (which has five
subgroups), and 2 million to 1 for the Flat version (which has six subgroups). Still frighteningly
high but, at least, now a lot better than the lottery. And that is the worst case scenario.
In practice, the odds are likely to be considerably lower - once, in fact, as low as double-figures.
That can happen in years when the form works out well, with the stronger fancies doing their
stuff. And/or in the years when our shortlists have contained a lot more than just ten
countable, scoring horses, as in the recent seasons for 2005-6, 2006-7
and 2007-8 for example. The odds against anybody ever lining up a winning
line will always be very daunting, of course. No point in pretending otherwise.
And, one year, our shortlist totally blew out and, inevitably, it will do so again sooner or
later. Nevertheless, win or lose, the odds are always going to be a lot better if you
use our system than if you do your own thing and try to pick your own lines of ten from the
full master-list of horses and perm them ad hoc. The odds of you pulling that off, when
the list used to consist of 500 horses, were 245 million million million to 1 against.
Need we say more!
In practice, you can shorten the odds further by using the stronger fancies from our shortlist
in more lines than the more speculative fancies. For instance, most sections of the system's
shortlist are built around blocks of four horses. In fact, the first Jumps' block (which
is for 2m Champion Hurdle types) always includes exactly four horses. Sometimes blocks
in the shortlist may contain a blank space. The blanks are what help to bring the overall
total down below 36, but each blank still has to be permed into your lines of ten pro-rata with
its position in a block. The blank then serves later as a wildcard entry. The top
(strongest) horse should typically go in twice as many lines as the bottom (weakest) horse in
a block of four (or four-times as many in a block of 8). And the horses in between, or
blank space(s), pro-rata. So, if horse A was, say, in six of your lines,
horse B might be in five lines, a blank space in four lines and horse D in three lines.
So the truncated coverage might look something like this...
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...where 'w' could be up to four different horses picked anywhere from the same block and/or
from anywhere else in the entire shortlist. In this example, the 'w' could be used, say,
to cover Horse A one more time (i.e. 7 times instead of 6), Horse B one more time (i.e. 6 times
instead of 5) and any horse from any other block two more times (i.e. using the blank like a
full wildcard twice). This is only a small example with only a few lines, but it shows
how to weight horses and blank spaces according to their positions within a block.
By repeating the above style of weighting for each other block in the shortlist, the theoretical
odds can be significantly swung in your favour in years when the form works out as it should.
This tactic helps to make it perfectly feasible to cover 36 selections in a relatively small
number of lines with a high expectation of success. Until, that is, the competition actually
gets underway, and all the wrong results start happening!
In our perming illustration above, we have used a block of two from four which, admittedly,
is easy to cover fairly tightly. Where it gets harder is in some of the other blocks in
the system's shortlist which involve either two from eight or (over Jumps) one case of three
from twelve. There is no way those blocks can be permed tightly within themselves - let
alone with the other blocks. It would take 6 million lines to cover every possible combination.
But, whenever the stronger horses do the business and/or an excess of countable horses occur
within the eight and twelve horse blocks, which is often what does occur in our shortlists,
then the chance of success is always going to be there.
If, as we have advised elsewhere, you do about twelve lines each year (cost £144), we recommend
you should, in your first four lines, cover all 36 selections, using a mix in each of those
lines of stronger horses with more speculative horses. By covering every horse at least
once, you will, at least, enjoy a steady flow of runners to keep your interest up, right through
the season, with many of those runners in the crucial key races. Also, by the end of December
in... continued in RH col. |
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Item 4 continued from LH col.
the Jumps competition, if there are, say, ten or more winners in the shortlist, you will be
guaranteed to have every one of them at least once somewhere in one of those first four lines.
Of course, sod's law means the ten scorers will fall 3 3 2 2 across those four
lines but. But, if they fell right for you, and it's undeniably a possibility, then you
would be high up on the half-way leaderboard and you could even be in with a chance of winning
the first £10K bonus prize of the competition for most points in December. And that
particular prize is proving to be the easiest opportunity of winning as our shortlist provided
multiple winning lines in three of the four Decembers from 2004 to 2007. A third advantage
of covering all 36 horses at least once is, come substitution time, you will be guaranteed every
one of the shortlist's winners somewhere in your entry. So, although you may be out of
the running for the overall Jumps' prize, you may find, with the aid of two additions per line
in February, that you at least have some lines with a chance of winning the Cheltenham £25K
bonus prize or the March £10K prize. Well that's the theory anyway.
So, if you do a dozen or so lines, then, after covering all 36 horses in the first four lines,
you should, for the remaining lines, start applying some weighting to the horses (i.e. covering
some horses more than others, maybe even leaving some out altogether). Mix them about
a bit, using 50% skilled judgement and, just as important, 50% imaginative intuition -
giving it your very best shot to try to bring the eventual best-scoring ten from the shortlist
together in one of your lines.
In any year when there are vacancies (blank spaces) in the shortlist they must be included in
your first four lines, and pro-rata in other lines in accordance with their weighting (position)
in their block. Each vacancy serves as a wildcard as per the system's wildcard rule.
Do not bypass or ignore the vacant slots as they provide a powerful fine-tuning opportunity.
Similarly, do not abuse a wildcard opportunity by bringing in personal fancies from outside
the shortlist. It may not seem like it to you, but it will mean you are effectively trying
to cover more than 36 selections. That, of course, will dilute your entry and,
ultimately, reduce, not enhance, your chances of winning.
We are occasionally asked are we not spoiling our own chances of ever winning the competition
again by publishing our shortlist and rules for all-and-sundry to see. But it's not a
problem. The more people who do the competition, especially the large syndicated entries
doing their own thing, the bigger the pot for everyone else to share. And, in any case,
the chances of two different people entering identical winning lists of 10 horses from
the same shortlist of 36 selections is, at £12 per line, financially non-existent.
5. Which horses should you do?
Your horses have to be chosen from a master list printed in the Racing Post newspaper.
So they are actually giving you the winning list to start off with! It is definitely in
there somewhere - all you have to do is fathom out where, using knowledge and judgement!
Easier said than done, true, but perfectly feasible, and always very enjoyable just trying.
However, our own carefully prepared shortlist, published here on this website each season, is
as good a starting point as you could possibly hope to find.
One big tip, when reading any articles about your fancies, is not to be sucked in by glowing
reports about the stars of last year (which any fool can write). All too often,
it will turn out that it was last year you needed them, not the coming year. The
bulk of past stars regularly fail to shine again in the following season to the same degree
as before. Though the few which do are nearly always all vital to a winning entry.
So, a balance between horses with established class and horses potentially high class, combined
with an expectation for every selection to achieve 75 points on average, based on the type of
race you expect it to be targeted at, is what should dictate the actual horses you do.
6. How many lines should you do?
As we said earlier, the competition has been won by people doing as few as two or three lines.
But that was unusual. Most winners have usually made a much more determined attempt to
win than that. In fact, a lot of entrants form small syndicates with friends and family
in order to spread the cost of entering a reasonable number of lines. If you were to cover
up to 36 horses, as we tend to do, you need to enter at least a dozen lines, more if you can
afford it, though do not go over the top. In this respect, the competition is much like
the Lotto. Beyond a certain point, doing more lines will not increase your chances of
winning - it will merely increase your chance of losing more! Try not to lose sight
of this simple law of probability.
In any competition there must, by definition, be a great many more losers than winners.
But this particular competition is, without doubt, as we said at the start, the "thinking
man's lottery". So, make entering it every Jumps' season a regular part of the rest
of your life!
7. Well-structured lines are so important
To give yourself a realistic chance of winning the competition, and the first prize of £xxxK,
you require a well-structured entry that has been put together better than anybody else's.
Failure to observe good line structure is what destroys the vast bulk of entries. By using
our perming rules, the structuring of lines is taken care of automatically.
A well-structured entry for the Jumps is one where every line entered contains horses, in appropriate
proportions, which will run in bonus races like the Paddy Power Gold Cup, Hennessy and King
George, or in other valuable prep-races en route to ultimately contending championship races
like the Champion Hurdle, Arkle, Champion Chase, RSA chase, World Hurdle and Gold Cup.
If you would like to see how our structuring strategy was applied, with enormous potential,
in past Jumps' seasons, click back through the "Prvs TTFs" tab at the top of each
page.
A well-structured entry for the Flat is one where every line entered contains horses, in appropriate
proportions, that will be contending all the top-class Flat races throughout the season, from
sprint distances, through the Classic distances, to the Cup (staying) races.
The "Prvs TTFs" tab at the top of each page will, eventually, take you all the way
back to the pages for 2003, 2002 & 2001 if you wanted to see how our structuring strategy
was applied to the Flat in those early years of posting our system online. They were formative
years but the potential for astounding success was there from the very start.
8. Easier than ever to win on the Flat
The above heading was written in May 2001, when this page was first posted here, and held true
for three years, 2001, 2 & 3. In 2004, there was an adverse change in the Flat competition's
rules which forced us to discontinue the Flat version of system for the next four years 2004,
5, 6 & 7.
That 'Easier than ever...' heading had been prompted by competition rule changes first introduced
for the 2001 season. The changes came after a survey of entrants' opinions the year before
which favoured a later closing date for entries at the end of May (i.e. pre-Derby), not the
end of April (pre-Guineas) as before. The later closing date prevailed for three years
after which the rule was, unfortunately, changed back to the original, earlier closing date
in 2004. That rule change put the Flat version of our system out of action. That remained
the situation for four more Flat seasons until, in 2008, in an effort to stem the dwindling
support for the Flat competition, the organisers restored the later starting date. Accordingly,
we resurrected the Flat version of our system for the 2008 season, though only as a blank template
for users to write in horses of their own choosing.
Purely for the record, the reason the Flat TTF became easier for somebody to win in 2001, and
much fairer for absolutely everybody, was actually fourfold: (i) most important of all
was that the start of the competition was deferred by a month, to the beginning of June, just
before the English Oaks and Derby, instead of at the beginning of May (just before the 1,000
and 2,000 Guineas) - the later start meant there was some current Classic, and major trials'
form to go on, (ii) which Godolphin horses would come to Britain to race had previously
been a dire guessing game but were now much more likely to be known, (iii) the number of
horses to choose from for the Flat was halved, from 1,000 down to only 500, (iv) the number
of 50-point bonus races was nearly doubled - from only 9 in 1999 to as many as 16 in 2001, with
all the new ones being top-class conditions races, as opposed to handicaps, thus making the
type of horse to concentrate on even simpler.
In the years prior to 2001, missing out on more than one Classic winner had been like the kiss
of death for the rest of the season. But, thanks to the later start in 2001, and the extra
bonus races, the need to bias one's entry around a lot of mainly unknown, underexposed 3yo milers
(for the two Guineas races) was completely eliminated. We were so confident in our prediction
that 2001 was the year we first posted our Ten To Follow system here on the internet for all
to see. Straightaway, the system went on to produce a line that beat the real winner's
score. The first prize that year was £116,000.
The following year (2002) saw two more official rule changes. This time, done without
canvassing competitors' opinions. One unfortunate change was the promotion of three Breeders'
Cup races from 25-point races to 50-point bonus-status (idea abandoned in subsequent years).
The other unfortunate change was the doubling of the cost of entries from £5 per line
to £10 per line. These new changes sadly resulted in around 25% of people then dropping
out of the Flat competition, or having to reduce their number of lines. But the first-prize
for the Flat that year, nevertheless, rose hugely from £116,000 in 2001 to £166,000
in 2002. A very nice touch for the winner. [Our system managed a line that year
which could have won 2nd prize, worth £23,740.]
It was back to another possible 1st prize for the system in 2003. But, after that, in
2004, the Flat competition sadly reverted to an earlier (pre-Guineas) closing date in April.
The extra bonus races still meant, at least, that missing more than one Classic winner would
not necessarily be the kiss of death it had been before. Nevertheless, it was obvious
the Flat competition was being made impossibly difficult for our systematic approach.
And so it was that, after enjoying remarkable online performances in the three Flat seasons
of 2001, 2 & 3, we had to discontinue our Flat shortlists as from 2004.
In 2008, a later start was restored to the Flat competition, plus free substitutions.
Consequently, we were able to resurrect the Flat version of our system. However, we only
posted the raw method i.e. just the rules, suitably updated, and a blank table with no horses
names for that year - leaving followers to choose all their own horses.
In 2009, the competition changed back to a pre-Guineas start so our Flat system was put to bed
again.
What next?
We would like to end by saying if, at your first attempt at the Jumps competition with our system,
you do not succeed, do not give up. Try again the following season. And remember
that just seeing your name on the leader board is a very major achievement in its own right
in this competition. To actually win some money will, frustratingly, always elude virtually
everybody, with or without the help of our system. But enabling people to finish higher
than they have ever managed before, often with their names in the paper, is something our system
has helped plenty of people to do.
If you have any comments, queries or, nearer the time, some horses to suggest for possible inclusion
in our next Jumps shortlist, click the Contact button below to e-mail us.
We have never knowingly failed to respond to any new, first-time e-mailers.
If you do write but do not get a reply, not even after a while, it will, unfortunately, have
meant your e-mail to us, or our reply to you, will have been blocked somewhere
along the line by over-zealous anti-spam filters. So, if that happens to you, please don't
bear a grudge or be put off our system because of it, 'cos we're nice guys really.
Cheers everybody, and good luck. |
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