Last updated: 22 June 2026
You walk into the shop, glance at the board, and a horse you quite fancy is showing 10/1. Is that a good price? Most backers genuinely have no idea. They feel the number is big, big feels generous, so they have a bet. The trouble is that 10/1 is only generous if the horse’s real chance is shorter than 10/1. And the only way to know that is to have already decided, in your own head, what the price should be.
That private number is a tissue. It is the single most useful habit a serious bettor can build, and almost nobody does it, because it sounds like maths and feels like effort. It is neither, really. Once you have made a few you can rough one out in a few minutes, and from then on every price you see has a number to be measured against rather than a feeling.
What is a tissue price in betting?
A tissue price is your own forecast of a horse’s true odds, made before you look at the market. You turn each runner’s chance into a percentage, total the field, then convert those percentages into odds. When the price on offer is bigger than your tissue, you may have found value. When it is shorter, you leave it alone.
What a tissue price actually is
A tissue is a full set of prices for a race, built from your own opinion rather than copied off a screen. It is exactly what an odds compiler does for a living. He looks at a race, weighs up every runner, and gives each one a price that reflects how likely he thinks it is to win. String those prices together and you have his tissue, the early market the rest of us bet into.
Here is the part that matters. A tissue is not a prediction of the winner. It is an estimate of chance, expressed as a price. This is the discipline most backers skip, and it is the one that separates a guess from a bet. Picking the most likely winner and finding a good bet are two different jobs. A horse can be the obvious answer to “what will win?” and still be a poor wager, because the market has already overpaid for that certainty. A tissue forces you to answer the harder, more profitable question: not who wins, but what is each runner truly worth. It is the same instinct behind building an odds line from ratings rather than backing names.
How to build a simple tissue in about five minutes
Start with the crudest possible assumption: every horse has an equal chance. In an eight-runner handicap that is 100 divided by 8, which is 12.5% each. At this point every horse is roughly 7/1, and the tissue is deliberately stupid. Now you make it less stupid by rewarding what the form actually shows.
Pick a handful of factors you trust. Going, class, distance, official rating, course form, trainer form, jockey form is a sensible starting seven. For each runner, add one percentage point for every factor that genuinely looks like a positive for today’s race. A horse proven on the ground, dropping to a winnable class, and certain to get the trip might pick up three points. A horse with nothing in its favour stays on the bare 12.5%. You are not being precise here, you are being honest about which runners have more going for them than the rest.
Add it all up and your percentages will total more than 100, because you have handed out extra. That is fine and expected. The last step is to scale the whole field back so it totals 100% again, taking proportionally more off the no-hopers than off your fancied runners. Convert each final percentage to odds (100 divided by the percentage gives you the decimal-ish figure, so 17.5% is about 9/2) and you have a working tissue. Try it over a hundred bets, compare every selection to the live price, and back only the ones where you are getting more than your number. If you finish in front, you have made money from finding value rather than from finding winners.
The over-round: why the bookies’ tissue never adds up to 100%
When you build your tissue you scale it back to 100%, because 100% is the honest total of all the chances in a race. The bookmaker does the opposite. He scales his book up, to something like 115% or 120%, and that extra slice is his margin. It is called the over-round, and it is the reason that backing every horse in a race at the shop price loses you money even though one of them is certain to win.
This is why your own tissue is worth the effort. Your 100% line is the fair version of the race. The board in the shop is the fair race plus a built-in tax. When you lay your number next to theirs, you are not just asking “is this price big?” You are asking “is this price big enough to beat the margin baked into it?” That is a far better question, and it is one the casual backer never thinks to ask.
Turn your tissue into a bet
The bet is simple once the tissue exists. You priced a horse at 9/2. You walk in and it is 8/1. You are being offered far more than you think the horse is worth, so you take it. If it had been 3/1 you would walk straight past, however much you liked the horse, because the price no longer pays you for the risk. Liking a horse and backing a horse are not the same act. The price decides.
The honest way to know whether the habit actually works is to track it. Do not measure yourself on how clever the analysis felt, measure your selections on actual versus expected at Betfair SP over a real sample. If the horses you judged to be over-priced win more often than the market expected, your tissue is genuinely beating the line and you have an edge worth protecting. If they do not, your tissue needs work, and that is useful to know too. This is also where the related discipline of the minimum odds you should take comes from: your tissue price is, in effect, the shortest price you can sensibly accept.
Where a tissue gets its accuracy
A hand-built tissue is a fine place to learn, but the points-per-positive method is blunt. It treats every factor as worth the same single point, when in reality going suitability might matter far more than jockey form in one race and far less in another. The better your tissue reflects how much each factor is genuinely worth under today’s conditions, the closer it gets to the truth, and the more often the market hands you a mistake to take advantage of.
This is exactly what Race Advisor’s Race Predictor does, only it weighs hundreds of factors at once instead of seven, and it weights them by how much they have actually mattered rather than by gut feel. The output is a win probability for every runner, which is a tissue in all but name: a full, model-built line for the race that you can lay against the live market in seconds.
And the data says that model-built line holds up. Race Advisor’s analysis of more than 536,000 UK runners between 2013 and 2026 measures those win probabilities against Betfair SP. Take the top fifth of runners by predicted chance, the ones the model is most confident about. They win 26.0% of the time, and they return an actual versus expected of 1.07 at Betfair SP. That group does not just win often, it wins more often than its exchange price implies, which is the entire point of a tissue.
Sort the same field by Race Advisor’s PR rating and the picture repeats. The top-rated horse wins 33.4% of the time, and across every rank the actual versus expected stays between 1.02 and 1.07, so the order is honest at the price, not just on paper. The edge is sharpest over jumps, where the model’s most confident chasers run to an actual versus expected of 1.18.
Whether you build your tissue by hand or read one off the Race Predictor, the lesson is the same. Decide what a horse is worth before the market tells you what it costs. Do that consistently and you stop being a backer who reacts to prices, and start being one who judges them. See the Race Predictor’s probabilities priced up against today’s market on today’s racecards, and try laying your own tissue next to one race a day this week.
