'I napped a 50-1 winner and I've still got the picture in my office' - legendary tipster Henry Rix on how he's banged in winners for 30 years

A lot of water has passed under the punting bridge since Henry Rix was catapulted to fame some 30 years ago as the 'poster boy' of tipping in the Racing Post. You might even say the bridge has been demolished to make way for a space-time portal, such has been the extent of the change in the landscape.

Rix made his name as the curator of the Betting Bureau in the Racing Post, a page at the cutting edge of data-driven analysis for the modern punter, pioneering the use of speed figures in an age when they were seen by some as infernal wizardry. So it comes as a stark reminder of the rapidly evolving nature of the beast to hear him dismiss what was once his stock-in-trade as a thing of the distant past, from dark art to the Dark Ages.

"Speed figures were hard to access and you had to really work to find them," he explains. "Your average punter wouldn't have had access to them, so that was always our starting point, but as with every edge it gets eroded, and you have to find another one that nobody else knows about, because to win you need to know something other people don't.