A Look at the Betting Market at Royal Ascot
June sees what most flat racing aficionados see as the best meeting of the year. Yes, I am talking about Royal Ascot. This meeting sees some of the best Group races of the year being contested along with some devilishly difficult handicap races to try and unravel.
In this piece I plan to do a deep dive into the betting market and see if I can find any useful pointers. I will be looking at the last 15 meetings spanning from 2011 to 2025 with all profits and losses being calculated to Betfair Starting Price (BSP) less 2% commission on any winning bets.
Let me start by combining ALL races at the meeting and see how different market positions have fared. I have used the Betfair SP prices to determine market position:
Favourites and second favourites have both nudged into a very small profit. Those third in the betting though have performed quite poorly in terms of returns losing nearly 11 pence in the £.
Those sixth in the betting have made a profit but before 2025 they had made an overall loss; in 2025 they bizarrely had six winners producing a profit of nearly £80 with most of these winners coming from handicap races.
Hence, I would not be rushing to back horses sixth in the betting blind. Once we get to 7th or bigger in the betting, we can see that performance has dipped markedly with overall losses a smidge above 13p in the £.
Group 1 Races
I want to narrow things down and look at market performance in just the highest class of race, namely the Group 1 contests.
The splits for these have been as follows:
These races have been dominated by the front end of the betting market. Favourites and second favs have both secured a profit, with those third in the betting having done too.
In addition to the win market the top three in the betting would have made you money if backing the Place on the Betfair market too.
The top three in the betting have accounted for 83 of the 116 Royal Ascot Group 1 winners which equates to 71.6% of all of the races. This is a higher figure than that for all other Group 1 races run in the past 15 years at all other UK venues combined.
In these races the top three of the betting have accounted for 67.5% of all winners.
Hence, it seems that Royal Ascot Group 1s are more ‘punter friendly’ than Group 1 races generally.
Handicap Races
I would like to now look at the handicap data, again in terms of the betting market. Now many of the handicaps here have very big fields so that will make the win percentages for each market position lower across the board.
Indeed, the top three in the betting have accounted for only 36.7% of all the winners, roughly half of the Group 1 figure we saw earlier.
Here are the splits:
Favourites have done well winning roughly one in every five for a return of 8p in the £. Those third in the betting have a bizarrely dreadful record losing nearly 65p for every £1 bet.
I am guessing this is more down to luck / variance than anything else. Those sixth in the betting have made a good profit but as stated earlier many of those wins came in 2025 probably skewing the figures somewhat.
Once we get to seventh or bigger in the betting things start to get tougher. Hence, although big outsiders can win, they do not tend to win often enough and of course, the successful ones are going to be really difficult to find.
When we are talking huge outsiders, those that had a Betfair SP of 80.0 or bigger, of the 288 qualifying runners just one has been successful producing an overall loss of £150.78 (ROI – 52.4%).
That does not make for pretty reading.
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