Last updated: 22 June 2026
Most people who bet on horses are trying to do one thing: find the winner. It is the obvious bet, the one everyone understands, and for that very reason it is the hardest place in the whole sport to make money. The crowd is good at picking winners. That is precisely the problem. There is far more profit hiding in the markets almost nobody bothers with.
What are side markets in horse racing, and why bet them?
Side markets are the bets beyond the win market: the place market, the forecast, the tricast, the exacta. The crowd prices the win market efficiently, so favourites rarely offer value. The crowd is far worse at pricing the order of finish, so forecasts and tricasts can hide real value, as long as you can stomach the longer losing runs that come with harder bets.
What counts as a side market
The win market is the headline act. Everything else is a side market, and each one asks you a slightly harder question. The place market only needs a horse to finish in the first two, three or four, depending on the size of the field. It used to be the preserve of Betfair and the Tote, but place betting is now widely available across the bookmakers, so getting on is no longer the obstacle it once was.
From there the questions get tougher. The forecast asks you to name the first two home in the correct order. The tricast wants the first three, again in order. The exacta and trifecta are the Tote versions of the same idea. The each-way market sits in between, half win bet and half place bet in a single stake. Each step up the ladder is a harder prediction than the last, and that difficulty is the whole point.
Why the win market is the hardest place to find value
To make a profit from horse racing, or from any form of betting, you have to be better than the majority of backers. That is not a motivational line, it is mechanics. The crowd sets the odds. Bookmakers shade and balance their books, but the starting point is always where the weight of money goes, and the weight of money is the collective opinion of thousands of backers.
Here is the uncomfortable truth about that crowd: when it comes to finding the winner, it is good. Favourites win more races than any other runner, and everyone knows it. Because everyone knows it, the price gets bid down until the value is squeezed out. The favourite wins often and pays badly, and those two facts are the same fact. This is why successful backers, myself included, never stop talking about value odds. Backing winners is not the goal. Backing horses at bigger prices than their true chance deserves is the goal, and the win market is where the crowd has made that hardest to do.
The honest way to measure all this is actual versus expected at Betfair SP. It simply asks whether a group of horses won more often than their prices implied they should. A figure above one means there was value in backing them; a figure of around one means the market had them priced about right. Race Advisor’s analysis of more than 1.1 million UK runners with a Betfair SP, from 2013 to 2026, shows exactly how tight the win market is. The favourite wins about 34.5% of all races, yet its actual-versus-expected figure sits at 1.00. Across more than 128,000 races that is as close to break-even as betting gets. Back every favourite blind and you tread water; lay every favourite blind and you tread water. The crowd has priced the most obvious runner almost perfectly.
It is not only the favourite. Our own proprietary ratings tell the same story. The top horse by PR rating wins 32.3% of the time and the top horse by VDW rating wins 25.8%, but across every rank the actual-versus-expected figure holds between 0.99 and 1.01. Even the strongest rated runner on the card prices to fair in the win market. The information is real, but the value has already been bid into the odds. That is the wall every win-market backer eventually hits, and it is why the value gets pushed out toward the side markets in the first place.
Where the crowd gets it wrong, and you get paid
Now ask the crowd a harder question. The mass of backers are still reasonably good at the place market, because finishing in the first few is close cousin to winning. But push on to the forecast, and the accuracy falls away. Push on again to the tricast or the exacta, and it collapses.
Picture stopping a stranger in the betting shop and asking them, off the top of their head, which three horses will fill the first three places in the right order, and how likely that is. They would be miles off. Almost everyone would be. That collective vagueness is not a flaw to laugh at; it is where your profit lives. When the crowd cannot price something accurately, the odds drift away from the true chance, and a bettor who has actually done the work can find value that simply does not exist in the win market. Harder questions are priced more loosely, and loosely priced bets are where the money is.
The catch: harder bets mean longer losing runs
None of this comes free. The reason the forecast and tricast pay more is that they win less often, and winning less often means longer stretches between winners. A method that lands a tricast at a big price can be genuinely profitable and still go weeks without a return. If that prospect makes you twitchy, side markets will quietly empty your account while you wait for the maths to arrive, because you will lose patience and start tinkering at exactly the wrong moment.
So be honest with yourself about temperament before you go anywhere near these markets. Long losing runs are not a sign the method is broken; with rare, high-priced bets they are completely normal, and the profit is back-loaded into the wins when they come. If you understand that losing runs are part of winning, and you can keep staking through them without flinching, the side markets reward you for a discipline most backers do not have. If you cannot, stick to shorter-priced bets where the wins come often enough to keep you steady.
How to build a side-market method without fooling yourself
The trap with rare, big-priced bets is that a tiny run of results tells you almost nothing, yet feels like it tells you everything. Land two tricasts in a fortnight and you will be convinced you have cracked it. Miss for a month and you will be convinced it is dead. Both feelings are noise. The only cure is a proper sample, gathered honestly before you commit serious money.
Treat a side-market idea exactly as you would any other betting system. Write down every qualifier the moment it is a bet, log the price you would have taken, and settle it honestly afterwards, win or lose. If your method covers several runners in a race, the same record-keeping applies whether you are Dutching the win market or stacking a forecast permutation. Run it across a real stretch of racing, then judge it on actual versus expected, not on the warm glow of the last big winner. A method that clears one over a meaningful sample is worth backing. A method that does not is worth knowing about before it costs you, not after.
Start a clean record of your next set of side-market selections with the free Bet Tracking tool, run it across today’s racecards at stakes you are comfortable losing for a while, and let the numbers, not the near-misses, tell you whether the value you suspected is really there.
