For those who aren’t sure, National Hunt racing applies to horse races where they jump fences, ditches and other intervening obstacles.

National Hunt racing in the UK is divided into two major distinct branches: Hurdles (jump over hurdles only) and Steeplechases (jump over a variety of obstacles). Alongside these there are Irish ‘bumpers’, which are National Hunt Flat races.

The biggest National Hunt events of the year in the UK are generally considered to be the Grand National at Aintree and the Cheltenham Gold Cup.

Andy’s National Hunters is an email-based tipping service that applies to National Hunt racing only.

It’s another generic tipping service from Circle Media, whose past products have often left something to be desired (that something is usually a bank roll).

The headline on the Andy’s National Hunters sales page reads: ‘Make over £3,000 per month betting on National Hunt’, but in our trial we were – perhaps unsurprisingly – far from that figure.

It’s a very cheap tipping service, priced at only £10 (plus VAT in EU) for an entire year. Brings to mind the old saying ‘If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys’.

There’s an inevitable 60-day unconditional money-back guarantee, because this tipping service is sold via the go-to sales platform for quick money-making exercises like this: Clickbank.

And when I say money-making, I mean solely for the vendor of the service.

The service claims to have some bold credentials: ‘We have been helping determined punters make a living from events like the Cheltenham Festival, Punchestown Festival and the King George VI Chase for the last 3 years. During these 3 years, 95% of our punters managed to make an AVERAGE of £3,345 a season from religiously following our personalised tips.’

Quite a claim for a service that’s only charging you £10 for an entire year.

The origin for the system is when Andy reportedly looked at the National Hunt and he ‘began to think’: ‘What if I could find a way to harness and control the unpredictability? And find a solution for the problem.’

The system aims to exploit situations when handicappers give the wrong weights – as well as other factors – that leads to under betting. This is when the market doesn’t bet as much on a horse as it should do. Favourites aren’t always the real favourites, because sometimes bookmakers balance their books.

Balancing the books is a process of changing the odds they are offering based on the amount of money being bet on the horses in the race.

Andy says: ‘The bookies aren’t interested in which horse is most likely to win the race. They’re interested in which horse the betting public thinks is most likely to win the race. This is how they create the loophole that I explained earlier.’

It’s an intriguing niche from which to create a tipping service – but is it any good?

Andy “I’m a family man… my children are the reason I’m committed to making this work…” – the creator of Andy’s National Hunters – claims a very modest 57% strike rate with average odds at 3/1. But then, elsewhere on the marketing page, he claims a 63% strike rate. Still relatively modest – especially when compared to the glitter that’s usually piled on sales pages like this – but which figure is it?

This sort of inconsistency, alas, became a motif for the entire trial.

The tips arrive in the morning, daily – or near enough – and they’re straightforward to implement, taking just a few minutes.

But the results never came in our trial. In 8 weeks, which included Cheltenham, there were 39 tips and only 9 were winning tips. This 23% strike rate is a long way off the 57 or 63% strike rate that’s promised.

The bank didn’t suffer too badly by the end of the trial, being only 3 points down, but the entire affair seemed lackluster and seemingly directionless, with the given tips sometimes being the favourites when we thought the aim of the exercise was to locate horses that are the true favourites, but aren’t presented as such.

As said above, Andy’s National Hunters is based on an interesting slant, but it didn’t perform for us, and the £10-for-12-months fee makes us worry that it’s a service that exists solely for its attractive subscription cost – a cost that few people would bother trying to get a refund for.