Bookies vs. Exchange Prices. Surprising results!

October 16th, 2019

We all know that betting on the exchanges will result in better odds than betting with a bookmaker, don't we?

The answer is NO!

Read on, because you will be surprised by our findings and we will show you how you can make way over £10,000 a year using this knowledge.

Exchange SP vs. Bookmaker SP

First, let's look at a comparison of exchange starting price versus bookmaker starting price.

NOTE: We have looked at the period 1st May 2016 to 14th August 2017 and we are assuming that you will pay 5% commission on the exchange.

In the image above you can see that over the period stated there were over 162,000 bets with over 17,000 winners.

Backing them all with a £1 stake to bookmaker SP would have returned a -£44079 loss but backing them on the exchanges would have returned a much lower loss of -£4570 after 5% commission.

So, in this case the prices on the exchanges at SP, are much better than bookmaker SP.

A better example

Let's look at a better example because you would never back all horses in all races.

I have now filtered the same data set to just look at horses who are returning to the course within 7 days of their last race and who also won their last race.

This is a simple logical system that horses who win their last race are in good form or ahead of the handicapper so their trainer returns them to the track very quickly to exploit this.

Over this period there was 199 winners from 663 bets and you can see that there is still a big loss to bookmaker SP of -£39 to a £1 stake, but if you had backed at exchange SP you would be in profit by +£15 to a £1 stake.

At this stage, you must think I have gone mad!

Because at the top of this blog I said you can beat the exchanges using bookmakers but up to now all I have shown you is how much better exchange SP is when compared to bookmaker SP!

Well here's the rub

You don't have to take SP from bookmakers. You can take an early price and receive Best Odds Guaranteed, widely known as BOG.

NOTE: BOG means that when you take an early price or a fixed odds price about your selection for a particular race then if the SP (Starting Price) is greater, you are paid out at the biggest odds.

We have been compiling early prices from a major bookmaker since May 2016 at three different price points.

8:30pm the evening before,
7:30am on the morning of racing and
10.30am on the morning of racing.

We have added these to our Proform database and we can run systems and show the BOG returns to each of the price points.

The systems results are now:

                        

You can see we now have an extra image showing you the results to the three price points

EP = 8:30pm the evening before
BP = 7:30am on the morning of racing
MP = 10.30am on the morning of racing.

If you take an Evening Price (EP) about a horse at around 8.30pm you would have made a significant increase in profits, in fact over 7.5x more profit than backing at exchange SP with +£116 profit to a £1 stake.

Backing at Breakfast Price (BP) is still 6x better than exchange SP with +£92 and even backing at Morning Price (MP) is 4x better with a profit of +£61.

NOTE: Backing at evening and breakfast prices will result in some Rule 4 deductions for non runners and could amount to about 30% less profit. In practice this is a lot less and backing at morning price (10.30am) even less as most non runners are already known.

Summary

So, you can beat the exchanges by betting BOG with bookmakers, preferably the night before.

But, how do I make over £10,000 a year?

At Proform we create various ratings and you can back these and make significant profits using BOG

We have placed all the details on how to do this in a second blog post which you can read by clicking below.

Show me how I can make over £10,000 a year using Proform Ratings