What does NAP mean in betting?
A NAP is the selection a tipster rates as their strongest bet of the day, a term from British horse racing that takes its name from the card game Napoleon.
Open the racing pages of a British or Irish newspaper and each tipster’s column has one horse marked NAP. It’s their headline pick, the one they’d choose if they could only make one bet that day. In the card game Napoleon, calling “nap” means going for every trick in the hand. The betting meaning follows from that.
You’ll often see NB beside it: “next best”, the runner-up pick.
The term is British and Irish through and through. American tipsters (called handicappers or cappers in the US) say “best bet” or “play of the day”. Some say “lock”, a word I’d treat as a red flag, because it implies a certainty that doesn’t exist. Football tipsters in the UK have borrowed “nap” too.
Example
A tipster posts three selections for Saturday:
- 2:10 Horse A at 3.00 — NAP
- 3:20 Horse B at 5.50 — NB
- 4:30 Horse C at 9.00
You back the nap with £10. If Horse A wins you get £30 back, a £20 profit. If not, you’re down £10, and the tipster’s nap record takes a dent.
That record is the useful bit. Because there’s exactly one nap per day, naps are easy to count. UK racing papers have long run naps tables ranking tipsters by profit to a level stake over a season.
Watch out
- A nap is a statement of confidence, not a probability. The odds don’t improve because someone wrote three letters next to the name.
- Naps lean toward short-priced favourites, so a tipster can have a high strike rate on them and still lose money. Look at profit to level stakes, not winners.
- One season’s table can be luck. Look for several.
More on reading records in how to judge a tipster.