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At the upper end, you find big-field handicaps with 20 or more runners, where each horse price can be inflated by a few ticks without any individual punter noticing the difference. The individual difference may be small — perhaps 5/1 versus 11/2 — but across hundreds of bets over a year, that cumulative margin is the difference between a profitable punter and a losing one. The take varies from state to state and the money is used to pay taxes, purse money for the horsemen, expenses at the track, and the track’s profit. If the exchange is at 7.0 and the bookmaker is at 6/1, the prices are closer, and after exchange commission the bookmaker might even be marginally better. Oddschecker is the most widely used in the UK and shows prices from all major bookmakers side by side, updated in near-real time. If the exchange offers 7.0 and the bookmaker offers 5/1, the bookmaker is taking a significantly larger margin on that runner, and you should either back on the exchange or find a bookmaker whose price is closer to the exchange level.
If the exchange back price is 8.0 and the best bookmaker is offering 6/1, the bookmaker is taking a significantly wider margin on that horse. Here is the workflow that experienced punters follow, stripped of anything unnecessary. And some operators apply BOG only to bets placed after a certain time in the morning, which means very early ante-post-style wagers do not qualify. Most bookmakers cap BOG payouts — some at a maximum enhanced payout of 500 pounds, others at a maximum uplift of a certain number of odds points. 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.
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!
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. Small-field races with well-fancied favourites tend to carry lower overrounds (closer to 110 per cent) because the market is more efficient and bookmakers compete harder on the headline price of the favourite. The difference between 5/1 and 6/1 on the same horse in the same race is a 20 per cent increase in profit — free money, essentially, for the 30 seconds it takes to check a second bookmaker. Odds expressed in decimals are meant to show the total payout the punter receives, which includes the winnings and the stake. In today’s day and age where automobiles have substituted the four legged animal, horses still retain importance.
By the time the race starts, competition among operators has usually tightened the market. Bookmakers open with a cautious book and adjust as money comes in. The first show of prices in the morning — often called the early prices — tends to carry a wider margin than the Starting Price. On the raceday market itself, there are consistent patterns. Ante-post markets on the Cheltenham Gold Cup or Champion Hurdle typically run between 140 and 160 per cent, which betting sites not gamstop is lower than the National but still significantly wider than raceday. The aggregate effect across 20 runners adds up to a much wider margin than in a six-runner race.
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. 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 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.
Across UK and Irish horse racing, typical bookmaker overrounds range from about 110 to 130 per cent. Understanding the typical ranges gives you a framework for evaluating whether the price you are being offered is competitive or padded. The margin a bookmaker builds into horse racing odds is not fixed. If you bet at a bookmaker with a consistently higher overround, you need a higher strike rate just to break even. 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.
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. 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.