UKC

Reading this made me think. http://m.westerndailypress.co.uk/Cheltenham-Festival-Fall-saves-bookmakers-...

I understand that is the bookies promote an accumulator and it come off, they loose. What I don't understand is how a favourite winning, or a string of favourites winning is such bad news for the bookies.

Why don't they set their odds so that they come out on top whoever wins?

In reply to ablackett:

Its my understanding that the odds fluctuate depending on how people bet. So if more people put money on one particular horse, the odds will go down on that one and may go up on another one to off set that risk. You can fix your odds when you place the bet, by writing the odds on the form at the bookies.

When a race is announced, you can get your bet on early, and you may get a horse for 20-1 which later on becomes a favourite at 2-1.

I would guess that the professional punters who bet big sums, put on their bets early and fix the odds. The public, who fancy a flutter, will have a lower stake at lower odds.

In reply to ablackett:

because whilst they control the odds they dont control how people are going to bet. You can encourage them to bet in certain ways but it aint guaranteed. Plus they can always be screwed over by an outside bet actually winning.

In reply to dissonance:

No one is screwed over unless corruption occurs in the mechanism whereby the odds are set (usually by information on a good horse that makes it look bad ... no easy task given the regulation and consequences of being caught). The bookie looses their side of the bet almost as often as the punter but just less often enough so that over many races they always make the required profit (odds adjust within races as well). Punters winning accumulators and very long odds bets just cause larger short term fluctuations but in the long run the cummulative odds still lead to a profit.

These press stories often relate to punters with 5 from 6 wins in place but failing to win the accumulator due to some perceived bad luck in the last race; they are nonsense but sell papers (the situation is no different to a punter losing one race from the first five but that doesn't make such a compelling tale).

In reply to ablackett:

if all the money is going on horse D, even at really lows odds, the money bet on the losers, A,B & C might not cover what they pay out on D. So they have to either lower the odds on D even further, or offer bigger odds on A,B,C to tempt some money in on them... but if D is at say 1-2, and ABC are all at 100-1... people will think ABC have zero hope and there still won't be a profit for the bookies... so they might put A at 5-1... which whilst still much longer than D, it looks it could be in with a chance, even though the bookies are pretty confident it has zero hope. It makes you think there is a race on, when in reality it's a foregone conclusion.

The favourites; lots of people simply only bet on the favourite, which statistically at any event may win once or twice in a 6 or 7 card event. So if you want to win X amount at the race, folk might bet enough on race 1 to win that amount, if they lose, they bet more on the favourite in Race 2 to cover their losses from R1 and still win X amount... statistically if you have a big enough pot and the ability to walk away once you've won your X, it can't fail. So in an event where the favourite wins most races, the bookies take a hit, from both zero knowledge joe public who simply picks the fav. and the professional following a system.

Clear as mud?!

In reply to Offwidth:

screwed was possibly not the right work. Buggered might be a better one in that they wouldnt get their christmas bonus.