James Maxwell
Founder & Editor · Last reviewed 2026-04-24
What Happened to Star Sports BOG
The short version for anyone in a hurry: Star Sports no longer offers Best Odds Guaranteed on horse racing. BOG was withdrawn in December 2024 and replaced with an expanded "Star Boosts" programme of enhanced prices on selected runners. If you are comparing bookmakers for BOG, Star Sports is not currently in that group — and any review page telling you it is has not been updated.
This matters, because BOG is one of the single most valuable features a bookmaker can offer a racing punter. The mechanic is simple: you take a price on a horse, and if the starting price (SP) turns out to be bigger than the price you took, the bookmaker pays you at the larger of the two. Over a season, that difference adds up to meaningful money. For a primer on how BOG works and why it matters, see our Best Odds Guaranteed guide.
Before the change, Star Sports offered BOG on UK and Irish horse and greyhound racing only, from 9am UK time on the day of the race, on singles and each-way singles. International racing was never included. Ante-post was never included. Those terms were in line with the tighter end of the UK bookmaker market — narrower than Bet365's coverage, which extends to some international racing, but otherwise comparable.
The withdrawal was quiet. Star Sports did not run a press announcement. The feature simply disappeared from the terms page, with the marketing team leaning into an expanded daily Star Boosts menu as the replacement value play. Football Ground Guide, footballwhispers.com and OLBG independently confirm the change — OLBG flags it in its 2026 review as the most important recent change to the Star Sports product.
For most racing punters, this is a meaningful negative. The question the rest of this page answers is whether Star Boosts genuinely fill the gap, and where Star Sports now sits relative to the six major rivals who still offer BOG across the board.
If you are purely comparing BOG policies, our best bookmakers for Best Odds Guaranteed page ranks the six UK operators that currently run the feature. If you have an existing Star Sports account — or are considering one for its other strengths — read on: the rest of this page covers what Star Boosts actually do, how they compare to BOG, and who still benefits from keeping a Star Sports account in a racing portfolio.
Star Boosts: What You Get Instead
What Star Boosts actually are
Star Boosts are enhanced, time-limited prices on selected runners — chosen by the trading floor at Star Sports rather than applied uniformly to every bet. On a typical racing day you will find Star Boosts flagged on the homepage carousel and on individual racecard pages, marked with a yellow boost icon. The boosts tend to cluster on the featured meetings — Cheltenham, Royal Ascot, Ffos Las, Lingfield, Newbury on a typical weekday card — and on high-profile Saturday ITV races.
The mechanic is the opposite of BOG. With BOG, you take any price you like and the bookmaker guarantees you are not worse off than SP. With a boost, the bookmaker picks the selection and tops the price — you take the boosted price or you leave it. There is no SP safety net underneath. If the horse drifts on-course, you are stuck with the price you took.
Where Star Boosts add real value
Boosts genuinely help a punter in two situations. The first is where Star Sports has already priced a runner more generously than the market and the boost adds enhancement on top — you get a materially better price than the consensus, with the downside only that there is no floor. The second is the Saturday ITV card or featured festival race, where the boost density is high enough that, if you have an opinion on the race, you can reliably find a Star Boost on your fancy.
Where they fall short of BOG
For the punter who bets across small meetings — Plumpton on a Monday, Wolverhampton on a Tuesday — boosts are useless. Star Sports does not apply boosts to every card. A punter who plays consistently across the racing week gets BOG value from Bet365, Betfred or Paddy Power on every bet, every day. Star Sports gets boosted value only where the trading floor has put a boost up, which is rarely outside the high-profile meetings.
For the ante-post punter, boosts never replace BOG value — ante-post was never included in BOG in the first place, so the withdrawal is neutral on that segment of the book.
For the each-way punter taking bigger-priced selections in handicaps, the Star Boost menu rarely covers the non-handicap runners a BOG policy would have protected automatically.
The honest trade-off
Star Sports is framing the switch as "more value through Star Boosts". For a narrow slice of punters — Saturday ITV coupons, big-race bettors, festival-only players — that framing is roughly true. For the broader racing audience the net change is negative, because BOG was a universal safety net and Star Boosts are a selective bonus. If daily value across every meeting matters to you, the replacement does not cover the gap.
Star Sports vs the BOG Bookmakers
The six major UK bookmakers who still offer BOG on UK and Irish racing are Bet365, Paddy Power, Betfred, William Hill, Ladbrokes and Coral. The terms differ at the edges, and those differences matter if you stake serious money.
Start-of-BOG times and coverage
Bet365 opens BOG at 08:00 UK time on the day of the race and covers UK and Irish racing, with some extension to international meetings. Paddy Power runs BOG from 08:00 on UK and Irish racing, on an opt-in basis. William Hill's BOG is documented from 08:00 in its January 2025 terms. Betfred is slightly different — it extends BOG to some selected international racing alongside UK and Irish, making it the widest-coverage BOG on the list. Coral and Ladbrokes cover UK and Irish racing plus UK greyhounds, both activating at 08:00.
Star Sports, of course, no longer offers any of this, so the comparison is binary: if BOG is important to you, Star Sports is not the right account in 2026.
Daily payout caps
The important fine print on any BOG feature is the cap on how much the BOG enhancement can pay out in a day. William Hill runs a £25,000-a-day cap. Paddy Power is the strictest at £1,000 per day. Coral caps around £50,000 and Ladbrokes at roughly £2,500 per day on BOG enhancements. For most punters these caps are high enough never to matter. For a big-staker working Cheltenham week, they can matter — and they are one reason a racing portfolio usually includes more than one BOG bookmaker.
Ante-post and non-runner policies
None of the six BOG operators applies BOG to ante-post bets — this is industry standard. What they do offer is a sustained Non-Runner No Bet (NRNB) programme on ante-post markets for the biggest festivals. All six run NRNB on every one of the 28 Cheltenham Festival races. Star Sports, by contrast, has extended NRNB to only four of the 28 Cheltenham races. Combined with the BOG absence, that makes Star Sports a materially weaker ante-post account for risk-averse punters — even though the Star Sports early prices are often competitive in isolation. Our NRNB myth deep-dive (coming soon) covers this trade-off in detail.
The honest summary
On BOG alone, Star Sports is uncompetitive in 2026. Any serious racing punter who wants the SP safety net should be opening accounts with Bet365, Betfred or Paddy Power before considering Star Sports. Where Star Sports earns a place in a racing portfolio is through its ante-post depth, its phone-betting trader desk that will lay big money — documented in Racing Post's "big bets, big calls, big pressure" trading-floor feature — and its on-course pitch network at the major meetings. Those are portfolio arguments, not primary-account arguments.
Our full Star Sports review covers the complete picture — product, people, the 2023 UKGC sanction, and who should and should not open an account.
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