Some Initial Analysis of Bookmaker Early Prices

Betting for horse racing punters has changed drastically since the introduction of online betting coupled with the advent of Betfair Betting Exchange launched in 2000.

Back in the 1980s and 90s punters had limited options in terms of betting with bookmakers as they could only bet in a betting shop or on course at the racing meeting in question. From there they basically had two choices in terms of the price obtained on their selection – take a price before the start of the race or take the final Starting Price.

Early morning prices were available when the shops opened, but not necessarily on every single race at every single meeting. For bookmakers this increased their edge over punters considerably.

In terms of pluses for the punters back then, odds compilers for bookmakers did not have the plethora of data and information on each runner that they have now. They would have the Racing Post and Sporting Life odds as a guide, but again these betting tissues came from similar odds compilers to them. Hence, odds compilers were prone to far more mistakes or ‘ricks’ in terms of pricing certain horses than they are these days.

For shrewd punters this was where they could get their edge, betting on those early price mistakes.

Moving on several years the Betfair Betting Exchange has become a major driving force in terms of helping shape these betting markets. They now exert far more influence on the betting market than the daily racing papers.

As the Betfair markets gain liquidity throughout the day they influence the bookmaker prices more and more. In terms of the night before racing, the liquidity of certain markets can vary greatly from race to race.

Some of the races, especially if it is run at a major race festival like Cheltenham or Royal Ascot will have decent liquidity and hence the prices will be fairly accurate for the night before a race. Others will have very limited liquidity and offer no real guide for the punter or indeed bookmaker.

As far as bookmaker odds compilers are concerned, these days many are pricing up races and offering said prices to the public on the evening before racing rather than on the morning of the race. Hence the Betfair market will not be a good guide for many of the races at this time due to what I noted in the previous paragraph.

However, due to 48-hour declarations, (it was 24-hour decs back in the 80s and 90s), coupled with better racing databases and computer models, it has made the job of pricing up races easier to accomplish for odds compilers these days. Not only that, but it has also almost certainly seen their overall accuracy improve too. This means there are less horses that have been given a price that is well out of kilter with their ‘true’ price.

However, mistakes do occur and as punters it will help our bottom line if we can take advantage in some way.

One way we as punters can take advantage of any potential mistakes the odds compilers cough up is by backing the overpriced horse as soon as we spot it.

The big advantage these days to any price we take early is that most bookmakers have the BOG option – Best Odds Guaranteed. Best Odds Guaranteed is a promotion offered by over 25 online bookmakers in the United Kingdom primarily aimed at betting on horse racing whereby if you take an early price on your horse and the industry starting price is different, if you win you are paid based on whichever odds were larger. BOG is available on race selections as early as the day before the race depending on the bookmaker.

Therefore, if we happen to get our price point wrong and the perceived value odds we took early actually got bigger, if the horse wins, we get paid at the higher SP odds.

Now the first few paragraphs have essentially been background to the main part of the piece which I want to share with you now.

The question I asked myself before starting my research was ‘of the main bookmakers, which ones offer the best early prices?’

I have looked at data for a whole week of racing comparing early prices of nine of the major bookmakers.

These are:

Bet 365, Befair Sportsbook, Betfred, Bet Victor, Corals, Ladbrokes, Sky Bet, Paddy Power, William Hill.

Of these nine, all bar Betfair offers BOG, although I noticed that some races where the bookmakers were offering ‘Extra Places’ BOG was not available. Sky Bet seem to have more races than other bookies where they offer ‘Extra Places’ so that is something to note if you consider betting with them regularly.

We will see the effect of this later.

I decided to focus on 9.30 to 9.45am each morning and I noted down the prices on offer for all races from those nine bookmakers. Now, I am sure that if I used an alternative time frame (say 10.15 to 10.30am) the findings may have been a bit different, but regardless of which time is ‘best’ to do this type of research, the important thing for me was to be consistent in terms of the same time frame each day.

Ideally, I would have liked to obtain the prices for all the races at just one exact time (say 9.30), by maybe flicking a button on my computer to pull in all the relevant data. Unfortunately, I don’t have the machinery, skills, tricks or capability to do that, so it took me around 15 minutes each day to get all the current prices from all the races.

The first bit of number crunching I did was I added up the total number of times that each bookmaker offered the best price in a specific race. To explain what I mean let me give you an example – it was the 4.45 race at Brighton on April 30^th, and the early prices are shown in the table below. I have not included the horse names simply due to space issues if I had tried to add another column. There were 8 runners with a warm favourite priced between 2.25 and 2.75. The best available prices are highlighted in red:

So, in this example, Bet 365 offered the best price on 6 of 8 the runners, Sky Bet on 1, Paddy Power on 3, William Hill on 4, Betfair on 2, etc, etc. These are the numbers I added up across all the races over the seven days.

Below is a table sharing the totals for each bookmaker in terms of the number of horses they offered the best price on from 9.30 to 9.45 each day over the seven days:

As you can see there is quite a difference between the nine bookmakers.

William Hill have come out on top offering the best value prices within the given time frame, followed by Bet 365. Sky Bet came bottom by some margin, but this is partly due to the number of races they offer extra places on compared to the other bookmakers. Hence adding extra places mean they need to be more frugal about their win prices on offer.

There were three more interesting findings I would like share.

1. The prices on offer from Ladbrokes and from Corals were essentially a carbon copy of each other. In over 95% of the races the same price for each horse was available from both of them. I guess that may not be as surprising as some people might think given that Ladbrokes and Corals merged back in 2016.

2. It seems at this time of the morning Bet Victor have no real interest in the evening cards because their prices were consistently much shorter than the other eight bookmakers for these later meetings. Indeed, for some of the evening meetings they did not have one single horse priced up as the best price on offer across all the firms.

3. It does seem that some firms do target certain races or meetings in terms of offering better value prices. Bet Victor definitely were far more competitive with their prices at the main meeting of the day. Likewise, William Hill seemed to target the bigger meetings even more than the rest.

I would now like to share the percentage of races over the seven days where each bookmaker had the greatest number of best prices within a given race. In the example I shared earlier, for that race it was Bet 365 as they had six best prices available to punters for that race, more than any of the others. It should be noted that occasionally there will be more than one firm offering the highest number of best prices so then any ‘joint winners’ have been counted. (This is why the percentages do not add up to 100, just in case you thought I’d made a ‘rick’ of my own!).

Here are my findings ordered from best to worst:

As we can see we have good correlation between the earlier set of figures.

In just over half of the races, William Hill had the highest number of best prices on offer per race when comparing them to the other eight bookmakers.

William Hill and Bet 365 were consistently offering punters the highest prices and hence were offering the best value in terms of win bets. Meanwhile, Betfred, Betfair Sportsbook and Sky Bet offered poor value to punters from a win bet perspective. As we know Sky Bet have excuses as they are often trying to lure in some each way punters with their better each way terms.

This is the first time I have looked early prices and tried to evaluate the data. It does seem from my seven-day findings that if you are looking to get the best early value prices then William Hill and Bet 365 will offer you the greatest value most of the time if betting to win. Therefore, if you do not have accounts with either, I suggest you remedy that!

Now as I have said, this is just one specific timeframe in the morning that I have looked at, and for only one week of the year. However, my guess is that if we looked at a month or even year of data for 9.30 to 9.45 prices, we would get a similar outcome.

This is an area that needs more research because come 10.30am it could be a different story. For me it has whetted my appetite to do more digging and at some point, in the future I plan to revisit this theme and write about any new findings.

Getting the best possible BOG prices is the best way to obtaining the best value. Betting models have shown that successful BOG betting will outperform Betfair SP. Essentially, we need to find out when those very best early prices are likely to be available.

David Renham