About Horse Betting Guide: What It Covers and How It Checks Figures
A plain-English guide to how betting on British horse racing works, with every figure worked out so you can check it yourself.
Published
Horse Betting Guide explains how betting on British horse racing works, from the first single to a Goliath. It covers what the odds mean, how each bet type is settled, the rules that change a result such as Rule 4 and dead heats, how to read a racecard and the going, and how the big meetings work for a bettor.
This page is about Horse Betting Guide itself: what it covers and how it works. The site is written for people who want to understand a bet before they place it. Every guide works through its examples with real stakes, so the figures can be checked with a pen, a calculator or the bet calculator on this site.
About Horse Betting Guide: what the guides set out to do
Each guide answers three questions about a bet: what it costs, what each result pays, and what the rules do when a race goes wrong. Picking the horse is left to you. The pages give you the tools to judge whether a price, a bet type or a set of place terms suits the horses you already fancy.
Where offers such as best odds guaranteed or extra places are explained, they are described as types of offer that vary from firm to firm, so the explanation stays true whichever firm you use.
How the figures are checked
Every money figure on this site comes from one settlement engine: the same code that runs the bet calculator. A worked example on a guide page, a table of returns and the figure the calculator shows on its first load are all produced by it, which keeps them consistent with each other.
The engine settles bets the way fixed-odds bets are settled in Britain. Each line of a multiple is worked out separately. Each way bets are two bets, with the place part paid at the fraction of the odds for that race. Rule 4 deductions come off the winnings, not the stake. Dead heats divide the stake. Non-runners drop out of a multiple and leave the other legs standing. The engine is tested against bets settled by hand, including every full-cover bet from a Trixie to a Goliath.
Where an example needs a number that can only be known after a race, such as a tote dividend or a computer straight forecast, the page says that the figure is invented for the example. The arithmetic around it is real.
How the rules are sourced
Racing and betting rules are checked against published sources: the rules of racing and the published betting rules of bookmakers and the tote, the British Horseracing Authority, the racecourses’ own information, and established racing media. Where a specific number is stated, such as a Rule 4 band, a runner limit or a place term, it has been checked against more than one source.
Where sources disagree, or where a figure changes from year to year, the page leaves the number out and says what to check instead. That happens more often than you might expect, and leaving a number out is always preferred to printing one that may be wrong. The maximum combined Rule 4 deduction when two horses are withdrawn is one example; the exact number of races at some festivals is another.
Offers are the part of betting that changes most. Anything described as an offer on this site is an example of how such offers work, not a statement about any particular firm’s current terms.
Betting safely
Betting is for adults only. In Britain you must be 18 or over to bet, on course, in a shop or online.
Decide what you can afford to lose before you start, and treat it as the cost of the day. Don’t chase losses with bigger bets. If betting stops being fun, free and confidential help is available from the National Gambling Helpline on 0808 8020 133, and GamStop lets you block yourself from every online betting site licensed in Britain.
Using the site
The guides are grouped into five sections: bet types, odds and rules, reading a race, the bet calculator and the festivals. The calculator settles any fixed-odds bet covered here, with each way, Rule 4, dead heats and non-runners, and every guide page links to the ones around it. If you are new to racing, the homepage is the place to start: it goes through a bet from the stake to the payout.