How Best Odds Guaranteed pays on a racing bet
One £10 win single, two different starting prices, and what the promotion changes.
You take 5/1 on a horse at nine in the morning with £10 on the win.
At nine in the morning a bookmaker offers 5/1 on a horse in the afternoon’s race. You stake £10 on it to win. That early price is the board price, and if the bet wins at that price it returns your stake plus five times your stake. The promotion changes one thing only: which price the bet is settled at. Nothing else about the bet is different.
The horse wins, and it starts at 8/1: a bigger price than you took.
By the off the market has moved and the horse goes down as 8/1. That is the starting price, usually shortened to SP. It is bigger than the 5/1 you took in the morning, which means that, had you waited, the same win would have paid more. This is the situation Best Odds Guaranteed exists for, and it happens only when the price drifts out between your bet and the race.
Best Odds Guaranteed pays the bigger price: £90 back instead of £60.
With the promotion on the bet, the bookmaker pays the better of your price and the starting price. Here that is 8/1, so the £10 win returns £90 including the stake, instead of the £60 that 5/1 would have paid. Each operator sets its own rules, including the start time on the day, the races covered, whether you must opt in, and a daily limit on the extra payout.
Without the promotion the bet pays at 5/1 whatever the horse starts at.
Take the promotion away and the bet is settled at the price you took, 5/1, however far the horse drifted. The return is £60 and the extra £30 that the starting price would have paid is simply not yours. That gap is the whole value of the promotion on this one bet, and it only exists because the price moved after you bet.
If the horse starts shorter, at 4/1, you keep your 5/1 price.
Suppose the market goes the other way and the horse starts at 4/1. The promotion never pays a shorter price than the one you took, so the bet stays at 5/1 and returns £60. You lose nothing against your original bet. This one-way rule is why the promotion is described as a guarantee of the better price, not as a guarantee of a win.
A Rule 4 deduction of 20p in the pound still comes off the winnings.
If a horse is withdrawn from the race after you bet, a Rule 4 deduction can apply to winning bets on the others. Here it is 20p in the pound, which takes a fifth off the winnings, whichever price the bet is paid at. The promotion raises the price but does not cancel the deduction, and the operator’s terms say how the two are applied together.
With the deduction, £74 comes back at 8/1 and £50 at 5/1.
Take the winnings first: £80 at 8/1 and £50 at 5/1 for a £10 stake. A deduction of 20p in the pound reduces them to £64 and £40, and the stake is then added back. That leaves £74 with the promotion and £50 without it. The deduction took a fifth of the winnings from both bets, so the promotion’s advantage shrinks by the same proportion.
Checked across 1,000 starting prices: the payout was never lower than your own price.
To check the one-way rule, the page pays the £10 bet at the better of 5/1 and each of 1,000 starting prices spread evenly from 1/1 to 20/1. In every case the payout was equal to or above the one at 5/1, and below it zero times. For starting prices at or under 5/1 the two were identical. The rule is simple arithmetic, which is why the check never fails.
Sources: William Hill help centre: Best Odds Guaranteed · Ladbrokes promotions: Best Odds Guaranteed on UK and Irish racing · Betfred: Horse Racing Best Odds Guaranteed · BetVictor: Best Odds Guaranteed terms