Why Is One Meeting Dearer to Bet At Than Another?

Because of how many horses are in the races, almost entirely. Not the prestige of the meeting, not the size of the prize, and not which country it is in.

Here is every festival we have measured, ranked by what the bookmakers charged.

Galway at 30.5% against Killarney at 23.0%. Two Irish summer festivals, three weeks apart, and one of them takes about a third more out of every pound staked.

Royal Ascot, the most prestigious meeting on the list, sits at 29.0%, near the top. The Epsom Derby meeting, which is hardly a minor fixture, sits near the bottom.

So the ranking is not about status. Something else is doing the work.

It is the size of the fields

Look at the runner column in that table and the answer appears. St Leger Festival came out cheapest at 21.4%, averaging 11.5 runners a race. Galway was dearest at 30.5%, off an average of 14.6 runners.

The mechanism is the one behind how much of your stake the bookmakers keep. A bookmaker takes a slice on every runner they price. More runners, more slices, and the slices at the bottom of the market are the fattest, because a 100/1 shot is marked at about a one-in-a-hundred chance and rarely wins that often.

You can see the same effect inside a single afternoon. At every one of the 9 meetings the dearest race of the week was a handicap, and at every one it had more runners than the cheapest race on the same card. At Ascot the spread ran from 7.8% to 48.5%, inside the same 5 days.

There is a second, smaller factor worth naming. Handicaps are dearer than Group races even allowing for field size, because handicaps are designed to be hard to predict and a wide-open market is one a bookmaker can charge more to price. But the field-size effect is much the larger of the two.

The spread inside a single card is wider still, which why one race costs more than the next takes apart race by race.

What this is worth knowing for

The practical version is short. If you are choosing between meetings on a Saturday, the one with smaller fields is the cheaper place to have your opinion, whatever the quality of the racing.

That will often be the less glamorous card. The big handicap at the big festival is the race with the most runners, the most talk and the most charge.

We should be clear about what this does and does not buy you. Betting in a cheaper race does not make you a winner: every approach we have tested across 29,483 races loses, and picking a cheaper race to lose in is still losing. What it changes is the rate, and the rate is one of the very few things about betting that is visible in advance and entirely within your control.

That is why we keep measuring it, and why we would rather publish a table of charges than a tip.

A word on all of this

None of these pages is a tip, and none describes a way to win. They describe what betting costs, which is a different and more reliable subject. If your betting has stopped being fun, BeGambleAware has free, confidential help, and the National Gambling Helpline is on 0808 8020 133.

Common questions

Which festival was the most expensive to bet at this summer?

Galway, at 30.5% over a fair book across its 54 measurable races. St Leger Festival was cheapest at 21.4%.

Do bookmakers charge more at the big meetings?

They charge more where the fields are bigger, and the big meetings tend to have bigger fields. Royal Ascot is near the top of our table, but the Epsom Derby meeting is near the bottom, so prestige on its own does not predict it.

Is Irish racing more expensive than British?

Not systematically on our numbers. Irish and British meetings sit at both ends of our table and all through the middle of it, and field size explains the order far better than the country does.

Does this mean I should avoid the big festivals?

Only if the cost is what you are optimising for. Most people are at a festival for the day rather than for the price, and that is a perfectly sensible reason to be there.

How were these figures measured?

From the starting-price book on every race with a full set of prices, using the site convention: overround is the margin over a fair book, takeout is the share of stakes the book keeps. Exchange and spread prices are excluded because they are not comparable.