Best Betting Strategies for Horse Racing in 2024

Best Odds Guaranteed

This is a feature that many bookmakers offer whereby you will be guaranteed the best possible odds for your bet. If the starting price (SP) is higher than the original odds that you took, then you will be paid out at the higher price. Best odds guaranteed is especially worth taking advantage of when betting on major races such as the Grand National, where the odds fluctuate so much before the off.

Shop Around

One of the easiest things that you can do is use an odds comparison website to shop around for the best price. You might not think it, but the odds on the same races and markets can differ hugely between bookmarkers – especially when it comes to horse racing.

Know Your Courses

Most beginners try to only concentrate on the horses and jockeys, but knowing your racecourses is just as important. Additionally, you should also look at the weather conditions on the day and think about how this will affect your horse’s performance on the course.

Avoid Favourites

Often, you will find that the favourite is best avoided in many cases. Payouts for favourite wins might be more likely but will usually result in lower long-term profits. And in actual fact, less than half of horse racing favourites actually end up winning.

Value Betting

First and foremost, you want to find value in your bets. This doesn’t mean simply locating the highest possible odds, it means using your own horse racing knowledge to find the real value of each wager. The odds that a bookmaker offers don’t show the true reality of an outcome coming to pass.

For example, if you see Facile Vega priced at 2/1 to win the Supreme Novice’s Hurdle at the Cheltenham Festival, this gives an implied probability of 33.3%. However, you might be able to roughly calculate, either through maths or your horse racing knowledge, that Facile Vega actually has a 35% chance of winning.

This would make the actual odds lower at 1.86/1, meaning that you have found better value in the bet at the bookies’ odds of 2/1. This doesn’t mean that the horse is going to win the race, but it gives you a better payout if it does. Value betting is a basic system that can be used on top of most other betting strategies for horse racing.

The Statical Lay

Instead of backing the winner, a lay bet involves betting on the losing outcome. This makes it an effective horse racing betting strategy, as there are multiple losers and only one winner. However, as most traditional bookmakers will only offer betting markets based on picking the winner, you will have to instead turn to a betting exchange.

There are plenty of betting exchange websites available, with Betfair being the market leader. On this type of betting site, you can either set the odds, or place your bet at the odds set by other punters.

For example, let’s say that you thought Facile Vega won’t win the race, your lay bet would win if you backed him and any other horse came first. This gives you a more probable outcome, but makes your bets less profitable.

The downside is that if you lose a lay bet on an exchange, you may have to pay out an amount greater than your initial stake. Overall, this makes it a potentially profitable horse racing betting strategy over time, but it is a slow mover that requires a lot of patience.

Back The Beaten Favourite

A beaten favourite is a horse that was the favourite for its last race but that ultimately lost on the day. You will usually be able to find them in the racecard as they will have “bf” marked next to them.

Like most betting strategies for horse racing, backing the beaten favourite requires some additional research. Essentially, you want to find out why it lost as the favourite last time out, to determine whether or not the horse can redeem itself in the next race.

There are multiple reasons why a favoured horse may not have won. For example, the weather conditions may not have suited it on the day, or it didn’t fare well on a particular track. For the next race, the horse might be set to run on a track that it is more familiar with.

Always take a close look and check for solid reasons to suggest that a beaten favourite will actually win on its next outing. Don’t just blindly back a beaten favourite for the sake of it.

The Dutching System

Having been developed in the 1920s, the dutching system is one of the oldest and most proven betting strategies for horse racing. Moreover, its concept is a simple one – it involves placing multiple different bets on the same race to increase your chance of a win. This can mean betting on different horses and/or different bet types – winner, place bet, each way, etc.

Of course, the key to the success of the dutching system is getting the maths done right. Effectively, you must ensure that one of your winning outcomes guarantees a profit. As a general rule, it is not advisable to back more than three horses in a single race.

For example, if you were to back three horses at £10 each, all at 2/1 odds, your total payout on any win would be £30. This gives you a total profit of £0, making the system pointless. Instead, you want to either only go for two selections, or look for higher odds to guarantee a profit should one of them win.

Each Way Betting Strategy

An each way bet provides some insurance should your horse fail to win but place. For example, if you were to place a £5 each way bet, your wager would cost £10 in total – with £5 going on the win and the other £5 on the place bet. There are therefore three possible outcomes with an each way bet:

1. Your horse wins, meaning both sides of the bet pays out.
2. Your horse only places, meaning that the place bet only pays out.
3. Your horse finished outside of the places, meaning that both bets lose.

An each way bet isn’t always the best option, and there are a few things that you should look at before deciding when to place an each way bet. The most important factors are the track size and the number of runners.

The optimal field size for you as the punter is a 16-runner race, which would make your place bet a quarter of the winning bet odds. For example, if the winner is 8/1, then the place bet would be 2/1.