Measured 2026-08-11
We can’t tell you how to pick winners — nobody can, and we’ve the failed experiments to prove it. We can tell you how to stop giving away ten points on the horses you were going to back anyway.
We took every market favourite in British and Irish racing over the nine months to June 2026 — 9,358 of them, no selection, no judgement, just whichever horse was shortest at 8am — and settled each one four different ways. Same horses, same days, same stakes. Only the method of settlement changed.
| How the bet settles | Return | |
|---|---|---|
| A plain bookmaker price | −4.3% | no BOG, no exchange |
| The same price, with BOG | +5.7% | +10.0 pts, and free |
| Betfair SP, 5% commission | +5.2% | +9.6 pts — level with BOG |
| Betfair SP, 2% commission | +7.5% | +11.8 pts — needs a discount plan |
They don’t stack. Best Odds Guaranteed and Betfair SP are two routes to roughly the same ten points, not two separate gains you can add together. On favourites the exchange at standard commission finishes 0.4 points behind BOG — a dead heat. If you already have BOG switched on, opening an exchange account will not by itself earn you anything.
Our own record now agrees directly. Earlier versions of this page said we couldn’t compute BOG on our own bets, because bookmakers’ SP was missing from half the record and missing non-randomly. That gap has since been filled. Measured 2026-08-15: SP is now present on 93% of settled picks, and across 842 settled picks carrying both a taken price and a Betfair SP, being paid at the bigger of the two is worth +5.8 points a bet against the same bets settled at the price we quoted. The price drifted on 33% of them. That is a smaller sample than the panel above and lands in the same place.
One caveat we’d rather state than bury: the price we quote is the best of around 29 bookmakers, which flatters the level of any return computed from it. It does not flatter the figure above — a price that is already generous is one the starting price beats less often, so +5.8 is a floor on what BOG is worth at a price you can actually get, not a ceiling.
Correction, 2026-08-11: earlier versions of this page put the exchange gap at 22 points, then showed it against a baseline with no BOG applied. The first came from an unrepresentative subset of our bets; the second made the exchange look like an additional gain on top of BOG when it is an alternative to it. Both are fixed above.
BOG means that if the horse’s starting price is bigger than the price you took, you get paid at the bigger one. You take 5/1, it goes off at 8/1, you’re paid at 8/1. It costs nothing, it applies automatically, and it is worth 10 points against the same bets without it.
It matters because prices move, and often against you: the starting price beat the 8am price on half of all bets in the panel. Without BOG, every penny of that is lost. It is a one-way option — it can only ever pay you more than the price you took, never less — so there is no case at all for turning it down.
Not every firm offers it, and terms vary: usually UK and Irish racing only, often only from a set time on the day, and sometimes not on every bet type. Worth reading your bookmaker’s current terms rather than assuming, because the entire ten points depends on it actually applying to the bets you place.
Exchanges charge commission on your net winnings instead of building a margin into every price. Against a plain price that difference is worth about the same as BOG. Against BOG, it depends entirely on what you back:
| What you’re backing | Better | By |
|---|---|---|
| Small fields (2–4 runners) | BOG | 9.0 pts |
| Short prices (under 3.0) | BOG | 1.3–1.7 pts |
| Ordinary fields (8–11) | level | 0.4 pts |
| Big fields (12+) | Exchange | 4.6 pts |
| Long prices (11.0+) | Exchange | 4.6 pts and rising |
The pattern has a cause. BOG is capped at the bookmakers’ starting price, and that price carries their margin; Betfair SP has no such ceiling. At short prices in small fields the cap barely binds and BOG’s free upside wins. At long prices in big fields it binds hard — across all runners rather than just favourites, the exchange beats BOG by nearly 10 points.
Taking Betfair SP is a specific order type: open the market on the Exchange (not the Sportsbook), switch to the SP tab, enter a stake with no odds, and it matches at the off. You can place it the night before. It assumes you’d have been matched at the SP — fair for liquid UK and Irish win markets, less so for a large stake in a small one.
There is also a reason to hold an exchange account that never shows up in a table of returns: bookmakers restrict customers who win. Exchanges don’t. If you do well at a bookmaker for long enough, your stakes get cut, and that is what eventually moves people across — not the 0.4 points.
Betfair’s base rate is 5% of net market winnings. Discount plans trade a monthly subscription for a lower rate, and on the favourites panel above this is the one place the exchange clearly beats BOG rather than matching it: at 2% commission it’s ahead by 1.8 points, comfortably clear of chance. Note the word above — on this site’s own picks that same comparison comes out 1.8 points the other way. See section 4.
Whether it pays depends entirely on turnover. A flat monthly fee is a fixed cost against a saving that scales with how much you stake, so there’s a crossover: below roughly £5 a day in stakes the plans that hand back free bets are ahead and the answer is no. Work out your own daily turnover before subscribing to anything.
One detail that’s easy to miss: commission costs proportionally less at short prices, because short prices win small and often. On a fairly-priced bet at 5%, expect it to cost about 2.5% of your stake at even money, about 4% at 4/1, and about 4.5% at 10/1. It never reaches the headline 5%.
Everything above is measured on market favourites. This site does not tip favourites, so the honest question is what happens on the horses it actually names. Run on 935 settled picks that carry both a taken price and a Betfair SP, the answer reverses: BOG comes out ahead at every commission rate, 2% included.
| How the bet settles | Return | |
|---|---|---|
| A plain bookmaker price | −0.7% | no BOG, no exchange |
| The same price, with BOG | +4.9% | +5.6 pts (z=5.2) — the winner here |
| Betfair SP, 2% commission | +3.0% | 1.8 pts behind BOG |
| Betfair SP, 5% commission | +0.9% | 4.0 pts behind BOG (z=−2.5) |
| Betfair SP, 6% commission | +0.2% | a typical rate, and the worst row |
Read the right-hand column, not the middle one. Those returns carry wide intervals and are not a claim that following this board makes money; the point-gaps beside them are computed on identical selections, so they carry none of that noise.
The reason is structural rather than lucky. BOG is capped at the bookmakers’ starting price, so it cannot win on big prices in big fields — which is exactly where the exchange earns its advantage on the wider panel. This board is mostly short-priced runners in small-to-medium fields, and 383 of those 935 picks were shorter than 2/1, where BOG is ahead by 4.3 points. The one place the exchange still wins here is fields of 12 or more, by 8 points a bet.
So which page do you believe? Both — they are different populations, and a gap measured on one cannot be carried to the other. If you back favourites broadly, the panel above applies. If you back the picks on this site, this table does, and a best-odds-guaranteed bookmaker is the better venue unless you are playing big fields.
Staking systems that scale with your confidence only work if you have a measurable edge. Ours is statistically indistinguishable from zero — the honest formula returns a stake of nothing at all. So the goal isn’t to maximise growth; it’s to keep the bankroll alive.
Flat stakes of 1–2% of whatever you’ve set aside. The same stake after a winner as after a loser. Chasing a losing run is what turns an affordable hobby into a problem.
It doesn’t make you a winner. Our published selections score indistinguishably from the market’s own prices — we’ve tried twelve separate approaches to beat it and written up every failure on how we measure. Better execution means losing more slowly, not winning.
And read the table at the top for what it is. Backing every favourite with BOG returned +5.7% over those nine months, and that is not a system — it’s one population over one stretch of time, carrying an error bar of nearly two points, and this site has killed effects that looked considerably stronger. The dependable part is the difference between the rows, not the sign of any one of them.
Anyone promising you a winning system is either mistaken or selling something. Our full record, wins and losses, is on results — nothing deleted.
