Tote 10 To Follow Competition 2014-2015

Ohhhh never,gutted.maybe has something to do with the fact that it's a nightmare trying to verify your proof of age before entering.took countless efforts before I could enter my selections.

It's all down to greed.  They should never have tinkered with the rules.  Should be pick 10 horses and that's it.  No subs, no star horses etc.  Made it crazy and turned folk off it.  Hence drop off in entry.

correct

Did it not start with 1000 horses to choose then down to 400 or something got a bit too compressed

When i last played it years ago it was £5 per entry, have as many as you liked pick 10 horses out of 1000 named alphabetically that were printed in the racing post each day leading up to the last possible day to which you could post your entries in time for the cut off or deadline day. (Showing me age now lol with snail mail)

I stopped playing it when it went up to £10 as i felt it became too expensive. Agreed the latest rules changes have made it far too serious even for most anoraks!

A bit of fun that lasted the whole season basically is the way i treated it

That's how I saw it STS.  It gave you an interest in races if you had a horse running.  Even if you had no chance of winning the whole competition you still had an interest in the monthly prizes.

Could be done so much better. Pick twelve, best ten to count, so early injuries don't knock you out. Run from Paddy Power to last day of Punchestown. Make scoring system simpler. Award weekly prizes, even if only £200 or so, to keep everyone's interest going throughout. This can be easily and profitably revived and what a shame Done has seen fit to announce this at such a time as to prevent anyone else having a go. Cynical.

E-mailed them to let them know I'd no longer be supporting the Racing Post newspaper or the on-line vsrsion going forward as a result of their decision. If more people did this, it might force a rethink (but unlikely). The greed factor in putting the cost up to £10 per entry signalled the slow death of the competition, combined with a marketing campaign that seems to have been orchestrated by a 6 year old child!

So where can we get our fix?

William Hill usually run a comp (starts with Hennessy i think), maybe a couple of newspapers too; would be good if we could get a list going.

Yeah hills do one with the mirror i think it was and you can normally get a couple of free tickets to go racing to boot

My resonse from the RP on the matter:

Thank you for your email.

We are sorry to learn of your disappointment, and are grateful to you for your feedback.

As per the statement in Thursday's paper, 'It has been increasingly difficult to justify running the competition from a commercial perspective and consequently, it has been decided not to run the Ten To Follow at this point'.

Please be assured that all correspondence that we receive on this matter will be collated, and subsequently viewed by those responsible for this decision.

Kind regards,
Alistair Broadbent
Racing Post Customer Services

  Gutted here

If it ain't broke don't fix it - shame they didn't heed that old maxim.

£5 to £10 per entry seemed to be the start of the decline, that and having a 6 year old in charge of the marketing and promotion of the competition.

TEN2FOLLOWER • October 19, 2014 8:22 AM BST
Cry  Gutted here

surely a change name required now

ps/ how long has this competition been going , now?

Howdi, think I've been entering for 20 years, although the prizes as small when I started entering as they were at the end.  But I think it had being going on a very small scale for t0te credit members before then.

what a shame

This is what I can find for the Billies competition. Based on 13/14. Shame for my season's prework to go to waste so will be getting involved.

William Hill 'The Jumps' is based on all National Hunt races (under the Rules of Racing in Great Britain or Ireland) during the period of the competition. The competition starts on Hennessy Gold Cup day - 30th November 2013 - and runs up to and including the last day of the Cheltenham Festival - 14th March 2014.

Simply pick 10 horses from The Jumps Easy Slip available in all William Hill shops.
One of your selections must be from the list of 8 Stable Stars.
Mark the box next to your selections and hand this in to a member of staff with your £2. You will then receive a printed receipt of your selections.
You can enter as many lists as you like however it is £2 per list and each entry must be on The Jumps Easy Slip (photocopies will not be accepted).
There is no period during the competition to substitute any selection. Selections cannot be changed after an entry is placed.
The competition starts on Hennessy Gold Cup day - 30th November 2013 and runs up to and including the last day of the Cheltenham Festival – March 14th 2014.
Entries must be made no later than noon on 30th November 2013. We would advise you to place your entry before this date to help our shop teams and avoid any possible disappointment.

The winner/s will be deemed as the person/persons with the highest aggregate number of points from their selections at the end of the competition.
The entry with the highest scoring aggregate number of points at the end of the competition will win £100,000.
The runner-up will win £50,000.
Where more than one entry achieves the highest number of points, the winner and runner up will be selected at random from the highest scoring entries.
In addition, a monthly cash prize of £1,500 will be awarded to each of the highest scoring entry submitted in Scotland and the highest scoring entry submitted in the UK (excluding Scotland).

The selecting at random thing is a bit, er random.
What happened to dead heat rules?
But I will be having a go at this one too.

Been playing for a good number of years too. Earliest recollection was selecting a darkish horse called Branston Abby who used to be thereabouts in Listed / Grade Three sprints, and who always got me some points.

^
coincidentally...the same owners Star Rage got me onto the leaderboard in the paper one year after a win.

wasnt star rage horse who won about 10 races in one season, duffy.....

Howdi.  Yes he was.  Although he had some seasons with fewer wins afterwards.

It's such a disappointment that this competition has gone so badly wrong. It was one of the most exciting ways you could spend a fiver back in the old days. As others have said, even if you bombed out completely you still had the hope of winning a monthly prize.

When I was just 19 I came within three points of winning 10k on on one of these as three horses I'd put in for Paddy Power, Hennessy and Greatwood prizes won decent races in February, having disappointed earlier.

It's such an incredibly simple formula and agree that it was wrecked by making the rules too fiddly. What was wrong with simply paying a fiver to jump on board with a list of 10 that were going for points based on the quality of the races and their Tote dividends? No need to make it more complicated than that.

Wish there was a way to reignite the same competition but without the Tote's involvement. You'd have thought that the RPost would back it if the task could be outsourced to someone to put together a list of 500/1000 horses for each season and build a functional website (which is actually pretty easy without the frills. I'd even gladly do it with a couple of helpers!

lets have our own competition and fight back.....i was kinda joking but is that a bad idea??

i'm too fecking busy to organise, mind

But Howdi you'd be great at it!

I have a long memory, and remember this delightful thread from 4 years ago

http://community.betfair.com/cheltenham2011/go/thread/view/113609/25859673/a...

lol ^^^^ I won that particular competition 8 years in a row

The bloke I used to play with , got the hump and doesn't play anymore.

Sign of the times. Not enough interest in racing anymore unfortunately. Go into a betting shop - or, shall I say arcade - and everyone is crowding around the FOBTs or filling in football coupons. Racing has lost out; no young people coming through. Wait until Timeform cease then people might sit up. It's a shame but the big firms are to blame.

Closed Totesport account telling them I no longer wished to use them now (and after getting several e-mails about £10 free bets etc to try and draw me back in). Told 'em to f@ck off (and why I was leaving)!

apologies if has been highlighted before only just stumbled upon it...

https://twitter.com/NH10toFollow