Around major meetings \u2014 Cheltenham, the Grand National, Royal Ascot \u2014 bookmakers offer boosted prices on selected runners. If the exchange offers 6.0 and the bookmaker offers 5\/1, the bookmaker is competitive after commission. Instead of setting odds and accepting bets against them, the exchange matches punters on opposite sides of a bet. 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 \u2014 perhaps 5\/1 versus 11\/2 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
The worst overrounds appear in ante-post markets, where the uncertainty justifies \u2014 in the bookmaker\u2019s view \u2014 margins that can reach extraordinary levels. The overround also tells you something about the race itself. The overround is 5.9 per cent, meaning the bookmaker has built a theoretical edge of just under 6 per cent into the market. It is the bookmaker\u2019s theoretical profit margin before a single bet is settled. In practice, they always sum to more \u2014 typically between 110 and 130 per cent for horse racing \u2014 and that excess is the overround. In a perfectly fair market with no margin, the implied probabilities of all runners in a race would sum to exactly 100 per cent.<\/p>\n
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Understanding those differences is where value lives. The bookmaker margin is built into every price, but how wide that margin is varies enormously between operators, between race types, and between the fixed-odds market and the betting exchange. Horse Racing Odds Comparison \u2014 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!<\/p>\n