Last updated: 22 June 2026
Two bookmakers are offering the same horse. One has it at 2/1, the other at 7/4. You back the 7/4 because that account is already open on your phone and logging into the other one is a faff. You have just handed back part of your profit, and you will do it again this afternoon, and most backers never notice they are doing it at all.
Getting the best price about your selection sounds like the most obvious advice in betting. Of course you take the bigger number. Yet I still meet serious backers who hold one or two accounts and take whatever those two happen to be showing. On the high street you would walk into five shops to save a tenner on a jacket. At the betting screen, the same people give the difference away without blinking.
Here is why it matters more than it looks, and how to fix it without turning your afternoon into admin.
How do you get the best price when betting on horse racing?
Open accounts with as many bookmakers as you can, compare every price before you bet, and take the biggest one available. Get on early when the value is freshest, use best odds guaranteed so a drift cannot hurt you, and treat the price you take as the single thing you most control.
The price you take is the part of betting you actually control
You cannot make a horse run faster. You cannot change the going, the draw, or whether the favourite has an off day. Almost everything that decides a race is out of your hands the moment the stalls open. The price is the exception. It is yours to choose, and it is the one decision in the whole process where you are guaranteed to either help yourself or hurt yourself.
This is where value comes in. A bet is only worth making when the price on offer is bigger than the horse’s true chance deserves, which is the whole idea behind value betting. Two backers can back the same horse on the same evidence; the one who takes 2/1 instead of 7/4 is being paid more for being right, and over a season that gap is the difference between a small profit and a small loss.
The cleanest way to see this is through actual versus expected, the ratio of the winners a price actually produces to the winners that price says it should. The market, taken as a whole, prices horses remarkably accurately, which means you rarely beat it on selection alone. You beat it on price. Race Advisor’s analysis of over 1.4 million UK runners between 2013 and 2026 shows it plainly. Back every one of those runners at the bookmaker’s starting price and the actual-versus-expected figure comes out at 0.89, the standard loss the bookmaker’s margin bakes in. Back the very same runners at Betfair SP and it climbs to 1.04. Not one selection changed. The price did.
And that is not a quirk of one corner of the market. Split those runners into price bands, from odds-on shots out to double-figure outsiders, and the actual-versus-expected line to Betfair SP stays almost flat, sitting between 1.02 and 1.08 the whole way across. The exchange beat the bookmaker’s starting price for 97 of every 100 runners, by a median of about a quarter. Even on well-backed favourites, where the gap is tightest, taking the bookmaker’s price rather than the exchange still gave back close to 8 percent of the odds. That alone drags a favourite’s actual-versus-expected from 1.04 down to 0.97, the difference between a small edge and a slow leak.
Why one or two bookmaker accounts is costing you money
Prices for the same horse vary across firms all day long. One bookmaker shades a runner because it has taken a few bets; another pushes the same horse out to tempt money in. If you only ever look at two of them, you are seeing two random snapshots and calling it the market.
The fix is dull, and it works. Open an account with every bookmaker you reasonably can. When you have a selection, line the firms up and take the biggest price showing. It takes seconds with the numbers side by side, and the saving compounds. A few percent better on every bet, across hundreds of bets a year, is real money that costs you nothing but the discipline to check.
It pays to understand the difference between bookmakers and the exchange here, because the best available number is not always sitting where you assume it is.
Get on early, before the price collapses
On a well-fancied horse, the value is usually freshest in the morning. The early prices are set before the bulk of the money arrives, and once the market wakes up and the cash piles in on a popular runner, that price shortens and the value drains out of it.
So if a horse meets your requirements on form and you are happy with the price, get on. Spread your stake across the firms offering the biggest numbers and lock the value in while it is there, rather than waiting until the afternoon and watching it go. Waiting rarely earns you a better price on a horse the rest of the market also likes. It usually earns you a worse one.
There is a flip side worth a line. If your selection shortens sharply before the off, you can lay some of it back on the exchange to protect your bank, but that is a separate skill for another day. Right now the habit to build is simply taking the best price early.
Best odds guaranteed, and the exchange question
Best odds guaranteed is the backer’s friend. Take an early price with a firm that offers it, and if the starting price comes in bigger, you get paid at the bigger one. Your downside on a drift is covered and your upside on a price that pushes out is protected. On the horses where it applies, taking an early price costs you nothing and can only help.
People often assume the exchange always offers the best number, and after commission it frequently does. But early in the day the liquidity is not there yet. You might find only a small amount available to back at the standout price, and once you have matched that, the rest of your stake has to go somewhere. Spreading across the top bookmaker prices can leave you better off than forcing the whole stake through a thin exchange market. Check both, every time, and take whichever genuinely pays you more after commission.
The honest catch: winning accounts get restricted
I am not going to pretend this is free money with no cost. The moment you start consistently taking the biggest price, you are doing exactly what bookmakers watch for, and winning accounts get limited or closed. Bet only when a firm is the standout price about a horse and you tend to get flagged quickly. Plenty of backers end up with a drawer full of useless accounts and have to lean on the exchange for anything like a decent bet.
That is real, and ignoring it would be dishonest. It does not change the principle, though. It changes the tactics. Keep more accounts than you think you need, vary what you bet and when, do not only ever strike at the absolute top price, and treat the exchange as the backbone that cannot gub you rather than the last resort. The aim stays the same: pay as little tax to a bad price as you possibly can.
None of this turns a losing selection into a winning one. Price discipline only matters once your selections are sound, because the biggest number in the world about a bad bet is still a bad bet. What it does is make sure that when you are right, you get paid properly for it, so that over a long season the value you worked to find ends up in your pocket instead of the bookmaker’s margin.
The simplest way to make this automatic is to know your own price before you ever look at theirs. Build a quick tissue for your selection, decide what number makes it value, then go shopping. Pull up today’s racecards, pick one race, price up your fancy, and take the biggest number on offer that still beats your line. Do that every day and you will have fixed the one part of betting you completely control.
