BOTB Review 2026: Is It a Scam and Can You Really Win a Car?

BOTB (Best of the Best) has been giving away dream cars and lifestyle prizes for over 20 years — but is it a scam and is it still worth entering in 2026? In this in-depth review, we look at how BOTB works, whether it’s legit, and what you need to know before buying your ticket!

Quick verdict: BOTB is a real, long-running UK competition company that has paid out prizes since 1999. It is not a scam. But it is also the least transparent of the major car competition sites on the one thing that matters most, which is how many people you are up against. If you want a known ticket cap and published odds, you will be happier elsewhere. If you like the skill element and the weekly car draws, it is legitimate and it pays out.

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BOTB at a glance

Website	Best of the Best (BOTB)
Founded	1999
Legal entity	Best of the Best plc
Ownership	Globe Invest Limited (Teddy Sagi) since 2023
Entry method	Paid entry plus a skill based Spot the Ball game
Free entry route	No postal route. Free app competitions run separately
Ticket prices seen	From 9p to £1.49 on live competitions
Published entry cap	None
Draw frequency	Weekly, closing Sunday, winners announced Tuesday
Trustpilot	4.0 out of 5 from 11,495 reviews
Company claim	Over £171m in prizes and more than 1m winners

Who actually owns BOTB in 2026

This is the part most BOTB reviews get wrong, and it matters if you are trying to work out whether the company is solid.

For years the standard reassurance was that BOTB was listed on the London Stock Exchange's AIM market, so its accounts were public and audited. That was true, and it was a fair point. It is no longer the situation.

In July 2023 Globe Invest Limited, the investment vehicle of Playtech founder Teddy Sagi, made a mandatory cash offer for Best of the Best plc at 535p a share. Acceptances passed 80 per cent, comfortably above the 75 per cent threshold needed, and the company applied to cancel its AIM listing. BOTB has been privately held since August 2023.

So if you read a review that tells you BOTB is safe because you can look up its share price, that review has not been updated in three years. The honest version is this: BOTB is now a private company owned by a very well capitalised operator with deep roots in the gaming industry. That is not a red flag. Sagi built Playtech into one of the largest gambling software businesses in the world. But it does mean the level of public financial disclosure is lower than it used to be, and you should judge BOTB on its 26 year payout record rather than on a listing it no longer has.

How BOTB actually works

BOTB is not a raffle and it is not a prize draw. The distinction is legal, not cosmetic, and it explains almost everything about how the site is set up.

You pick a competition, pay for your entry, and then play Spot the Ball. You are shown a photograph of a football match with the ball removed, and you click where you think the ball was. A judging panel decides the correct position independently, and the entry closest to that position wins. There is no random number generator anywhere in the process.

Because the winner is decided by judgement rather than chance, BOTB sits outside the Gambling Act 2005 as a game of skill. That is why it does not hold a Gambling Commission licence and does not need to offer a free postal entry route, which is the requirement that catches prize draw operators like 7days Performance.

Competitions close on Sunday and winners are announced on the following Tuesday. Winners can take the car or a cash alternative, and in practice a large share take the cash.

The subscription

BOTB Pass is a £9.99 a month subscription that opens up a set of subscriber only competitions, around 21 of them a month by BOTB's own count. Whether that is good value depends entirely on whether you were going to enter that often anyway. If you enter twice a year, it is not.

What it costs

Entry prices are set per competition and vary enormously depending on the prize. Live examples from the site at the time of writing:

• Ford Mustang GT, 9p per entry

• Mercedes AMG GT S, 21p per entry

• London dream home worth £1.25m, £1 per entry

• Around the World lifestyle competition with over £1.8m of prizes, £1.49 per entry

• BOTB Pass subscription, £9.99 per month

Those headline prices are genuinely low, and the pricing is the main thing BOTB has going for it against the rest of the market. A 9p entry to win a Mustang is cheaper per go than almost anything comparable.

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The odds problem

Here is the honest criticism, and it is the reason we rank BOTB below sites with published caps.

BOTB does not publish how many entries a competition receives, and it does not set a maximum. You can buy a 9p entry to win a Mustang without knowing whether you are one of ten thousand people or one of two million. There is no way to calculate your odds before you pay, and no way to check them afterwards.

Compare that with a capped operator. 7days Performance publishes a hard ceiling on every competition. On its Porsche 991 GT3 RS draw, for example, the cap is 999,999 entries at 22p each, with a maximum of 4,550 per person, and the sold counter is visible on the page. You can do the arithmetic before you spend anything: a full sellout brings in around £220,000 against a £100,000 cash alternative, which tells you roughly what share of the money is going back out as prizes.

With BOTB you cannot do that calculation at all. That is a legitimate transparency gap, and it is the single most common complaint in the negative Trustpilot reviews.

To be fair to BOTB, there is a reason for it. Because the winner is the closest Spot the Ball guess rather than a random ticket, "odds" are not strictly the right frame. Your skill genuinely affects the outcome, and two people paying the same 9p do not have identical chances. That is a real argument. It still does not tell you how many people you are competing against, which is what you actually want to know.

Is BOTB legit? The checklist

Signal	What to look for	BOTB
UK registered company	Companies House record	Yes, Best of the Best plc, trading since 1999
Track record	Years operating and prizes paid	26 years, over £171m in prizes claimed
Legal basis	Skill element or free entry route	Yes, skill based under the Gambling Act 2005
Public winners	Verifiable winner announcements	Yes, published weekly with names and photos
Published odds or caps	Entry numbers disclosed before you pay	No
Independent reviews	Volume and score on third party sites	4.0 out of 5 from 11,495 Trustpilot reviews
Clear terms	Accessible terms and prize rules	Yes

Six out of seven. The gap is transparency on entry numbers, not honesty about paying out.

What real customers say

BOTB's Trustpilot profile sits at 4.0 out of 5 across 11,495 reviews, which is a serious sample size. The breakdown is more interesting than the average:

• 5 star: 73 per cent

• 4 star: 10 per cent

• 3 star: 4 per cent

• 2 star: 3 per cent

• 1 star: 10 per cent

That shape, a big block of five star reviews with a stubborn ten per cent at one star, is typical of competition sites. The positive reviews are overwhelmingly from winners describing the handover process, which is consistent and well reviewed. The one star reviews cluster around two themes: people who feel the odds are unknowable, and people who dislike the marketing volume once you have an account.

Neither theme is an accusation of non payment. Across more than eleven thousand reviews there is no meaningful pattern of people saying they won and were not paid.

BOTB vs 7days Performance

	BOTB	7days Performance
Format	Spot the Ball skill game	Random draw with a skill question
Entry prices	From 9p	From 1p, headline from 79p
Entry cap published	No	Yes, on every competition
Can you calculate odds	No	Yes
Free entry route	No postal route	Yes, free postal entry
Draw frequency	Weekly, Tuesday announcements	Most nights, 9pm and 10pm
Draws streamed live	No	Yes, Facebook and YouTube
Draws if not sold out	Yes	Yes, no rollovers or extensions
Trustpilot	4.0 from 11,495	4.5 from 5,441
Trading since	1999	2018

Who BOTB suits

Enter BOTB if: you want the cheapest possible per entry price on a dream car, you like the idea that skill affects the result, and you are comfortable not knowing the field size. The 26 year record and the weekly cadence are genuine strengths.

Look elsewhere if: you want to know your odds before you pay, you want to watch the draw happen live, or you want a free entry route. Those are all things 7days Performance and most capped operators give you and BOTB does not.

Frequently asked questions

Is BOTB a scam?

No. BOTB has been trading since 1999, publishes its winners weekly with names and photographs, and holds a 4.0 rating across more than eleven thousand Trustpilot reviews. The criticism it attracts is about transparency on entry numbers, not about whether prizes are handed over.

Is BOTB still listed on the stock exchange?

No. Best of the Best plc was acquired by Globe Invest Limited, Teddy Sagi's investment vehicle, at 535p a share and cancelled its AIM listing in August 2023. It has been privately owned since. Reviews that still cite the listing as a trust signal are out of date.

What are the odds of winning with BOTB?

BOTB does not publish entry numbers or set a cap, so the odds cannot be calculated. This is the main transparency criticism of the site. Because the winner is decided by the closest Spot the Ball guess rather than a random draw, BOTB argues that conventional odds do not apply.

Can you enter BOTB for free?

There is no free postal entry route for the paid competitions. BOTB does not need one, because the Spot the Ball skill element puts it outside gambling legislation. BOTB does run separate free competitions through its app.

Do BOTB winners actually get the car?

Yes, and winners can take a cash alternative instead, which many do. Winner announcements are published weekly and the handover process is the most consistently praised part of the service in customer reviews.

Is Spot the Ball skill or luck?

Legally it is skill, which is what allows BOTB to operate without a Gambling Commission licence. In practice the judging panel's decision is not always intuitive, so most entrants treat it as closer to chance. Both things can be true at once.

The verdict

BOTB is legitimate, well established and it pays out. Twenty six years of trading, more than a million winners by its own count and eleven thousand largely positive reviews is not the profile of a scam, and the new ownership is a serious operator rather than a shell.

The reason it does not top our rankings is transparency. Not publishing entry caps in 2026, when the rest of the market does, is a choice, and it is the one thing that would move BOTB from good to excellent. Until that changes, we would send anyone who cares about knowing their odds to a capped operator first, and keep BOTB for the cheap headline entries on cars you actually want.

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