Best Odds Guaranteed Explained: What BOG Means on a Real Bet

Best odds guaranteed is a promise about which price you get paid at. You take a price on a horse, and if its starting price turns out bigger, the bet is settled at the starting price instead. If the horse shortens, you keep the price you took. Either way, you get the better of the two.

The short form is BOG, and you will see it on betting apps and shop screens next to the races it covers. It is an offer made by individual bookmakers, not a rule of racing, so the details belong to each firm.

BOG meaning, in one bet

Take a £10 win bet struck at 4/1 in the morning. By the off, the horse has drifted and the starting price is 6/1. Without the offer, the winner returns £50: your price was 4/1, and the market moving afterwards doesn’t change that. With best odds guaranteed, the bet is settled at 6/1 and returns £70.

Now reverse it. You take 7/2 with £20 and the horse is backed down to 3/1 at the off. Your price stands, and the winner returns £90. At the SP it would have been £80. With the offer, you are never worse off than the price you took.

That is the whole BOG meaning. It removes the downside of taking an early price, which is the risk that the horse drifts, while keeping the upside, which is that you beat a shortening price.

How does best odds guaranteed work in practice?

The offer only matters when two things happen together: you took a fixed price, and the horse went off at a bigger SP. If you bet at SP, you are paid at the SP anyway. If the price you took was bigger than the SP, you are paid at your price, as you would have been without the offer.

It usually applies to races on the day, and some firms only apply it to bets struck from a set time on the morning of racing. It doesn’t normally apply to ante-post bets, which are fixed prices struck days or weeks earlier, or to tote bets, which have no fixed price at all. Firms also leave out particular races, particular markets and bets placed through other promotions, and some leave out racing abroad. The exclusions differ from firm to firm, which is why the question is always “does it apply to this bet, here?” rather than “is it on?”

A useful habit is to look for the BOG marker on the race before you take a price. If it is there, taking the early price is close to a free option on the market moving your way.

Best odds guaranteed on each way bets

On firms that apply the offer to win and each way bets, both halves are settled at the better of the two prices. The place half is then worked out at the usual fraction of that price.

Here is £5 each way at 10/1, in a race paying 1/5 of the odds, on a horse whose SP is 14/1. If it wins, the win half is paid at 14/1 and the place half at 14/5, and the bet returns £94. At the price you took, it would have been £70. If it only places, the place half is paid at 14/5 and returns £19, against £15 at 10/5.

Each way is where the offer is worth most in pounds, because both halves improve together. It is also where it pays to check the terms, since a firm’s extra-place offers and its best odds offer don’t always combine.

Best odds guaranteed and Rule 4

A late withdrawal can bring Rule 4 into play on the same bet. The two don’t cancel out. Best odds guaranteed decides which price you are paid at, and the Rule 4 deduction then comes off the winnings at that price.

Say you took 9/2 with £10, the horse went off at 11/2, and a withdrawal carried a 15p deduction. Settled at 11/2, the winnings of £55 lose 15p in the pound, leaving £46.75, and with the stake the return is £56.75. At your own price of 9/2 with the same deduction, it would have been £48.25. The offer still improves the bet, even after the deduction.

One consequence is worth knowing: a withdrawal can make a horse’s SP shorter than it would otherwise have been, because the market re-forms without the missing horse. So on a race with a late withdrawal, the chance of the SP beating your price falls, and the offer is less likely to help. Rule 4 explained covers how the deductions are set.

What the offer changes

For a bookmaker, the offer has a cost on every bet where the horse drifts. It is also one of the few offers in racing that changes the settlement of an ordinary bet rather than adding a bonus on top.

For the bettor, it changes the calculation about when to bet. Without the offer, taking an early price is a gamble on which way the market will move. With it, the early price is a floor: you keep it if the horse shortens, and you move up to the SP if it drifts. That makes an early price the better choice on a race where the offer applies, as long as the bet itself qualifies.

What the offer adds up to

On any single bet, best odds guaranteed is worth nothing or a modest amount. Its value shows over a run of bets. Take four £10 winners, each backed in the morning, whose prices drifted by the off: 3/1 out to 4/1, 5/2 to 3/1, 6/1 to 15/2, and 2/1 to 9/4. At the prices taken, the four return £175 between them. Settled at the SPs, they return £207.50. The offer added £32.50, on bets that would have been winners anyway.

Those four examples are chosen to show the arithmetic, not to suggest how often horses drift. Plenty of winners shorten instead, and on those the offer adds nothing, because your own price was already the better one. The point is only that the offer never costs you anything on a qualifying bet, and sometimes pays.

Checking a best odds settlement

The settlement should show the price the bet was paid at. To check it, find the horse’s starting price in the official result and compare it with the price on your slip. If the SP was bigger and the race qualified, the bet should have been settled at the SP. If it was smaller, at your price.

When the numbers don’t match, the reason is usually one of three things. The race wasn’t covered by the offer. The bet was struck before the time the firm starts applying it. Or a Rule 4 deduction applied, which reduces the winnings at whichever price was used. The bet calculator will settle both versions side by side if you enter the two prices in turn, and it is a quick way to see which one you were paid.

Taking a price early or late

Without the offer, when to bet is a real decision. Take a price too early and the horse may drift. Wait for the SP and it may shorten. Horse racing odds explained covers why prices move during the day.

With the offer on a qualifying race, the decision mostly goes away. The early price becomes the lowest you can be paid, so there is little reason to wait, unless you are waiting for information: the going, a jockey change, or whether a rival runs. Those are reasons to delay a decision about which horse to back, not about which price to take.

A bigger price, or the offer?

Sometimes the choice is between two firms: one offering 5/1 with best odds guaranteed, the other 11/2 without it. Which is better depends entirely on where the SP ends up. With £10 on a winner, the 11/2 bet returns £65 and the 5/1 bet £60 if the horse goes off at 4/1, so the bigger fixed price wins. If the horse drifts to 7/1, the offer pays at the SP and returns £80, while the 11/2 bet is stuck at £65.

There is no way to know in advance which of those will happen. What the comparison does show is the size of the trade: a slightly bigger fixed price is worth a small, certain amount, and the offer is worth nothing or a lot. On a horse you expect to be backed, the bigger price is the natural choice. On one you think the market has overrated, the offer is.

The starting price behind it

Everything about the offer depends on the starting price, because that is the number your price is compared with. The SP is returned from the market at the off and published with the result, and it is the same figure whichever firm you bet with. Starting price explained goes through how it is returned.

That also explains a small quirk. Because the comparison is made with the official SP, a price you could have taken elsewhere just before the off doesn’t count. The offer compares your price with the SP, not with the best price on offer anywhere.

Where best odds guaranteed stops

It is worth being clear about what the offer doesn’t do. It doesn’t make a losing bet win. It doesn’t apply to bets settled at SP, since those already get the SP. It doesn’t normally reach ante-post bets, where non-runner no bet is the offer that matters, and it never applies to tote pools. Ante-post betting covers the offers that belong to bets struck well in advance.

Each firm sets its own terms, and they can change. The only best odds guaranteed that counts is the one printed against the race on the day you bet.