It does not require you to do anything special \u2014 just take an early price on a race where BOG is offered. Unlike free bets, which come with qualifying conditions and wagering requirements, BOG applies to every qualifying bet you place. A few bookmakers restrict BOG to races shown on ITV or feature meetings, excluding the smaller afternoon cards where drifts are more common.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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Our top Pace number will be in either the 1st or 2nd position at the first call 72.5% of the time. Our top win percentage horse wins 32.9% of the time. Forget the days of tireless past performance analysis, PDF downloads, and digging for angles or professional picks.<\/p>\n
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That small time investment \u2014 repeated across every bet you place \u2014 is the most reliable edge available to the average punter. If you are betting early in the day and BOG is on offer, take the best available bookmaker price. If the exchange back price is 8.0 and the best bookmaker is offering 6\/1, the bookmaker is taking a significantly wider margin on that horse. Here is the workflow that experienced punters follow, stripped of anything unnecessary. And some operators apply BOG only to bets placed after a certain time in the morning, which means very early ante-post-style wagers do not qualify.<\/p>\n
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The commission you pay on an exchange winning bet reduces your effective odds. On feature races \u2014 the Champion Hurdle, the Gold Cup, the Grand National, Saturday afternoon handicaps at major tracks \u2014 the exchange market is deep enough that you can back at the displayed price without difficulty. Where a bookmaker might offer 5\/1 on a horse with a 120 per cent book, the exchange might show 5.5 (or 9\/2 in fractional terms) on the same runner with a total market overround of 103 per cent. When bookmakers extend place terms on big handicaps \u2014 paying five or six places instead of four \u2014 they compensate by widening the margin on the place element of each-way bets. At the lower end, you find small-field Flat races \u2014 Group 1 contests with five or six runners where the form is well established and bookmakers compete aggressively on the headline price of the favourite.<\/p>\n
If the exchange is at 7.0 and the bookmaker is at 6\/1, the prices are closer, and after exchange commission the bookmaker might even be marginally better. Oddschecker is the most widely used in the UK and shows prices from all major bookmakers side by side, updated in near-real time. If the exchange offers 7.0 and the bookmaker offers 5\/1, the bookmaker is taking a significantly larger margin on that runner, and you should either back on the exchange or find a bookmaker whose price is closer to the exchange level. On short-priced selections \u2014 odds-on or evens \u2014 the exchange commission can actually make the bookmaker price competitive or even better, because the commission is a fixed percentage of the profit regardless of the odds.<\/p>\n
That means BOG triggers on a meaningful proportion of bets, and the average uplift when it does trigger is typically between half a point and two full points of odds. Research on UK racing suggests that around 35 to 40 per cent of runners drift to a higher SP than their morning price. The value of BOG depends on how much Starting Prices drift from the early prices. That decline puts pressure on bookmakers to attract and retain bettors.<\/p>\n