Betting
Check the exchange price on your selection before placing with a bookmaker. When should you use the exchange, and when should you use a bookmaker? There is a subtlety that experienced exchange users understand and newcomers often miss. Flutter Entertainment, which owns Betfair, reported global revenue of $14 billion in 2024 across 13.9 million average monthly users, but the exchange is only one part of that portfolio, and liquidity varies enormously by market.
The worst overrounds appear in ante-post markets, where the uncertainty justifies — in the bookmaker’s view — margins that can reach extraordinary levels. The overround also tells you something about the race itself. The overround is 5.9 per cent, meaning the bookmaker has built a theoretical edge of just under 6 per cent into the market. It is the bookmaker’s theoretical profit margin before a single bet is settled. In practice, they always sum to more — typically between 110 and 130 per cent for horse racing — and that excess is the overround. In a perfectly fair market with no margin, the implied probabilities of all runners in a race would sum to exactly 100 per cent.
First, it gives you a benchmark for whether the bookmaker prices are competitive. For any given horse, you can see the best available price highlighted, and the difference between the best and worst price is often two or three points of odds — the difference between 7/1 and 5/1 on the same horse in the same race. It does not require you to do anything special — just take an early price on a race where BOG is offered.
Where a bookmaker might offer 5/1 on a horse with a 120 per cent book, the exchange might show 5.5 (or 9/2 in fractional terms) on the same runner with a total market overround of 103 per cent. When bookmakers extend place terms on big handicaps — paying five or six places instead of four — they compensate by widening the margin on the place element of each-way bets. At the lower end, you find small-field Flat races — Group 1 contests with five or six runners where the form is well established and bookmakers compete aggressively on the headline price of the favourite. The difference between 3/1 and 7/2 is not dramatic on a single bet, but across 200 bets over a season it represents dozens of units of profit or loss. Checking the overround before you bet is not something most punters do, but it takes less than a minute with a calculator or an odds comparison site.
With the assistance of Equinedge I hit several races yesterday and netted over $1100 in profit. Although it won’t tell you how much the horse will pay, it does show the amount of profit you will get if you win and the amount you have to bet to get it. The figures indicate how much a punter would win using a stake of a $100. The money line is mostly used by the American bookies, which clearly displays an underdog, and a favorite. This is much simpler as the decimal figure is simply the payout per unit staked.
Unlike free bets, which come with qualifying conditions and wagering requirements, BOG applies to every qualifying bet you place. A few bookmakers restrict BOG to races shown on ITV or feature meetings, excluding the smaller afternoon cards where drifts are more common. That means BOG triggers on a meaningful proportion of bets, and the average uplift when it does trigger is typically between half a point and betting sites not with gamstop two full points of odds. Research on UK racing suggests that around 35 to 40 per cent of runners drift to a higher SP than their morning price.
Understanding those differences is where value lives. The bookmaker margin is built into every price, but how wide that margin is varies enormously between operators, between race types, and between the fixed-odds market and the betting exchange. Horse Racing Odds Comparison — More on this topic at horse racing bookmakers. Yet the majority of bettors place their bets with whichever app they last used, at whatever price happens to be on screen, without checking whether a better number is available elsewhere. @ScottyPick6 Scotty thank you so much for the winnings from the Saturday webinar. Biggest payout of my life!
Hundreds of thousands of pounds are matched, and the spread between the back and lay prices is narrow. That difference — roughly 10 per cent on the individual price — is the cost of the bookmaker margin. One person backs a horse to win; another lays it (bets against it winning). The betting exchange — Betfair being the dominant platform — operates on a fundamentally different model to a traditional bookmaker. Among fixed-odds bookmakers, bet365, Paddy Power, and William Hill tend to be competitive on feature races, while some smaller operators run wider books, particularly on less prominent meetings. By the time the race starts, competition among operators has usually tightened the market.
On horses that drift — less money than expected, price lengthening — BOG gives you the benefit of the higher SP. On horses that are supported in the market — money coming in, price shortening — BOG adds nothing, because the SP is lower than the price you took. Best Odds Guaranteed is one of the most powerful tools available to horse racing punters, and it is routinely undervalued. Using the exchange as a benchmark — even if you ultimately bet with a bookmaker — is one of the most effective habits a punter can develop.