Longshot Scott

In September 2013 he was invited onto TwitTopTipsters — the brainchild of Niall O’Connor, who’d built it as a social-media study for his university degree, to see how much traction a tipping site could get with no paid advertising at all. Five tipsters, each putting up a NAP, a Next Best and an “In With a Chance” every day, all recorded and run as a monthly league. The answer to his experiment turned out to be: a lot. It reached close to a million unique visitors in about thirteen months.

The following summer, on 2nd July 2014, Scott landed a 5355/1 treble — 20/1 and 14/1 winners at Kempton on the all-weather and a 16/1 shot at Chepstow. A perfect three from three. The site rather exploded, and Twitter never quite felt the same again — a feat he’s been trying to repeat ever since, though it may well have been once-in-a-lifetime stuff.

When Niall wrapped up his study, Scott took the site on — he’d filled in whenever Niall was away, and by his own admission running it rather tickled him. It was his first go at hosting a website. The change he’s proudest of was a short piece he began writing before the day’s tips — The Bettors’ Brief — looking back at the previous day’s racing, going through any beaten tips with honest logic, and giving a bit of insight into the day’s selections and who they were up against. Until then the site had just been a list: the date, five tipsters, three picks each, prices and times.

Within a year it was past 15,000 followers across platforms, one of the biggest racing accounts on Twitter at the time. It eventually grew too big to keep running for free around a full-time job and a young family, and Scott faced the choice every free tipster meets in the end: monetise it or fold it. Too proud to put #FreeTips behind a paywall, he folded it and walked away — not, he’ll admit, his finest decision.

So he set up his own independent blog under the name Longshot Scott — promising nothing daily, no schedule, just whatever he could manage, when he could manage it. It blew up again; a good chunk of the old army came across. The interest was too big for the casual thing he’d intended, so one night he put out a subscription offer: if enough people were in, he’d give it a proper go. He woke up to 130 subscribers, and he was away.

He grew it into a bit of everything racing — not just tips, but features and interviews from every corner of the sport: jockeys, trainers, data providers, presenters, even stable lads. He wanted readers to understand the game as broadly as possible. The subscribers ran from footballers, well-known owners and signed musicians to the everyday punter — all of them taking the way he broke a race down and building their own approach from it. One reader who barely knew the sport when he started is now a serious owner, with horses of his own.

Then life intervened. From around 2018 Scott had to wind it down, and eventually stop altogether, to care for his father. His father was battling alcoholism, and through some very hard years Scott became, in effect, his full-time carer — everything that wasn’t essential fell away, racing included. He lost him to it at the end of 2024.

For a good while afterwards, by his own account, he wasn’t much use to anyone. When he started to come back to himself, he knew he needed racing again — the studying, the replays, digging through a card for the one they’ve all overlooked.

In the summer of 2025 he started watching again, no betting, just getting his head back in. It was humbling: he’d once been able to reel off strings of horses for half the yards in the country, and now there were trainers and jockeys he’d never heard of. He had ground to make up — and he wanted to.

What he’d missed most was the writing — the discipline of putting it down and showing the working. So, without a word to anyone who used to follow him, he launched FormDial.

Everything those years taught him is in one place now: a reasoned Daily Dial selection before every off, every result logged in public, a staking plan holding it all together, and the thinking shown throughout — because that was always the part that mattered.

None of this is about plaudits, or being called the best tipster going — there are louder voices chasing that, and it has never been the aim here. The aim is simpler: to give anyone who fancies a bet a read they can genuinely trust — honest about the losers as much as the winners, and made to be enjoyed first, because racing should be entertainment before it is anything else. Beneath the enjoyment sits the part that matters most: a real insight into how a race is studied, how a bet is judged on its merits, and how the emotions are handled when it all plays out. Those are the things worth carrying away — and the hope, quite simply, is that they help every reader forge a study, and a betting future, of their own.