About RP Recommends

RP Recommends was launched in 2024 to provide punters with independent and trustworthy advice on bookmakers and the best places to bet. Our goal is to help you spend less time wondering where the best odds and offers are, while maximising the value and enjoyment you get from your betting.

We aim to be the leading authority on betting advice, providing recommendations that you can trust and rely upon. As part of that, it’s important that we are upfront about how our business operates. Like many other sports betting publishers, we receive some revenue from affiliate activity, so when you follow a recommendation and place a bet or open a betting account through our links, we might earn money from it.

However, all our opinions are completely impartial, we only recommend bookmakers on the basis that we genuinely believe they’re the best for the given purpose. Bookmakers have no influence on our recommendations, and we always adhere to our most important rule: we’ll never post a recommendation that our experts wouldn’t follow themselves.

Why you should trust us

Our experts have decades of betting experience between them and are obsessed with finding value. They’re the type of punters who have a dozen betting accounts, who compare the odds on every bet, who always scrutinise place terms and special offers to maximise value, and who spend the day before the Cheltenham Festival poring over all the offers to work out the best way to play their bets.

We’re also proud of our reputation at the Racing Post as an essential source of advice and information for bettors. There’s no incentive for us to give you anything but the best advice, because unlike some other websites that profess to offer this sort of information our business is based on your trust and loyalty, not search rankings or short-termism. We’ve been in business since 1986 and have many readers who have been with us from day one – that wouldn’t be the case if we didn’t provide reliable, high quality information.

How we make our recommendations

At the Racing Post, we pride ourselves on providing punters with honest and comprehensive reviews of bookmakers to ensure they can make informed choices about how and where to enhance their betting experience.

To help punters simplify those important decisions, we have introduced a ratings system that is applied to all our bookmaker reviews.

A five-star system will summarise our findings, but these will not be arbitrary numbers or simply guessed.

We will draw our conclusions from a host of criteria, each given different weights, to produce a final score that is clear and provides customers with a simple reference they can use to compare and contrast different bookmakers and their services.

All the bookmakers we recommend are fully licensed and regulated betting operators in the UK and Ireland, so a safe betting experience is guaranteed for the user, but our ratings will be able to show who the best firms are at a glance.

How does the rating system work? 

Our bookmaker ratings are based on a standardised, transparent and consistent set of criteria, helping us make fair and informed recommendations across all the operators we review.

Our experienced betting tipsters assess each bookmaker across nine key areas:

• Sports betting markets
• Odds and margins
• Bonuses and promotions
• Loyalty schemes
• Live betting features
• Payment systems
• User experience
• Customer support
• Responsible gambling

Each area is assessed against our review criteria, with some categories carrying more weight than others. Odds and margins, bonuses and promotions, and payment systems have the greatest weighting because of their importance to the overall betting experience.

Our tipsters use the bookmaker’s website and app, alongside their review of the available features, offers and services, to assess each category. This means a bookmaker can score highly in one area while receiving a lower score in another.

The scores from all nine categories are combined to produce an overall rating, which is then converted into one simple five-star rating.

How often do we update our recommendations?

Bookmakers evolve and develop new products constantly in an attempt to stay at the top of a competitive industry and that means our assessments of their offerings have to be adjusted from time to time to reflect the services available to customers.

With those potential changes in mind, our tipsters will look at the services available on a monthly basis to ensure the most up-to-date information is available to allow customers to make the most informed choices possible and lead to a fulfilling and safe betting experience.

How we flag our recommendations

Our recommendations will be prominently flagged within live editorial content on the Racing Post website and mobile app and always feature an image containing the trusted RP Recommends stamp, so you know which of the best bookmaker offers are being recommended by our experts.

You can expect to find featured RP Recommends promotions in news and tipping content on the Racing Post website and mobile app, highlighting the best bookmaker offers and enhancements within the context of the article you are reading.

We’ll also be publishing standalone RP Recommends articles, highlighting topics like the best incentives for Lucky 15 and multiples punters and each-way backers, as well as assessing wider bookmaker issues such as account restrictions and affordability checks.

The trusted stamp is what differentiates RP Recommends against generic bookmaker advertising, which you’ll also find alongside our regular digital content.