A nap is a tipster's strongest selection of the day: the single bet they are most confident about across all the day's racing. If a tipster gives ten selections, the nap is the one they would back above all the others.
Where the word comes from
The term comes from the card game Napoleon, in which "going nap" means betting everything on winning all the tricks: the boldest call you can make. In racing, calling a selection your nap is the same idea, your most confident shout.
What NB means
Alongside a nap you will often see NB, short for "next best": the tipster's second-strongest selection of the day. So the nap is the headline bet and the NB is the back-up.
The naps table
Newspapers and racing sites publish naps tables that track how each tipster's nap performs over a season, usually at level stakes and settled at starting price. It is a long-running competition to see whose strongest daily selection does best over time.
How to use naps. A nap is one person's opinion, not a certainty. The most confident selection is not always the best-value one: sometimes the strongest chance is also the shortest price. Weigh a nap against the odds, and treat it as a starting point, not a guarantee.
The Overlay's approach
We do not publish a single "nap" in the traditional sense, because our focus is on value rather than simply naming the most likely winner. Instead, our read rates every runner on how often its connections actually win versus what the price expects, and flags the horses we make bigger than the market. You can also see the naps of leading tipsters, cross-referenced against our own read, on our tipster naps board.