Five Hundred Races, Six Bookies and One Very Boring Spreadsheet: Does Best Odds Guaranteed Ever Actually Pay Up?

Best Odds Guaranteed is the most quietly brilliant offer in UK betting, and also the most quietly ignored. It's on every bookie's horse racing page, it costs you nothing to use, and yet most punters couldn't tell you the last time it actually put extra quid in their pocket.

So we decided to find out exactly how much it's worth. Five hundred races. Six major bookmakers. One spreadsheet that our editor described as "the dullest thing ever committed to a laptop." The results were genuinely useful — and occasionally surprising.

What BOG Actually Is (Thirty-Second Refresher)

In case you've been betting the footy only: Best Odds Guaranteed means if you take a price on a horse and the starting price comes back bigger, the bookie pays you at the bigger price. Take 4/1 in the morning, the horse drifts to 6/1 at the off, and you get paid at 6/1. If the horse shortens, your original price stands. There's no downside. It's the only offer in betting where the bookie hands you an option for free.

The catch — because there's always a catch — is that not all bookies apply it the same way. Caps differ. Some exclude certain meetings. And some seem, shall we say, less enthusiastic about it than others.

How We Ran It

Every day for a month, we picked a handful of UK and Irish races, noted the morning prices at six firms, then logged the starting prices and calculated what BOG actually paid out on top. We weighted things towards everyday racing — a Tuesday card at Taunton, not just the Cheltenham showcase stuff — because that's what most punters are actually betting on.

The Headline Numbers

Across the 500 races, BOG triggered an improved payout roughly 38% of the time. That's more often than most people assume. The average boost when it did land was about 14% on your return — so a £10 winner returning £50 might come back £55 or £57 instead.

The pattern was consistent: the value lives in the drifts. Horses that went off bigger than their morning price were where BOG earned its keep. Favourites that shortened delivered nothing, which is why punters who only back short-priced shots rarely notice the offer exists.

Who Was Most Generous?

We won't name and shame in the way the tabloids would, but the spread between the best and worst firm was real. The most generous bookie delivered an improvement on around 44% of qualifying bets with no obvious caps on mid-priced winners. The stingiest triggered closer to 30%, and applied lower maximum boosts on longer-priced winners — exactly the scenarios where BOG matters most.

The big firms were broadly reliable. Everyone paid up when they were meant to; the difference was how often the drifts were honoured at full value versus trimmed by caps and exclusions on bigger meetings.

When It Matters Most

Three situations stood out:

• Early prices on unfashionable tracks. Morning prices at the smaller meetings drifted far more often than prices at big Saturday fixtures, where the market is efficient and moves are tiny.
• Hype horses. Anything tipped in the papers or talked up on the telly tended to shorten, which kills BOG value. Backing the ones nobody's talking about is where the guarantees pay.
• Each-way plays. The each-way market is where drifts are commonest and the percentage bumps add up nicely over a season.

Is It Worth Shopping Around?

Honestly? Marginally. The difference between the best and worst firm on our sample worked out to a few pounds per hundred staked over a month. If you've already got funds with one bookie and they offer BOG properly, there's no strong reason to churn accounts for it. But if you're splitting stakes anyway, it's a genuine tiebreaker — a free option is a free option, whichever way you slice it.

The Verdict

Best Odds Guaranteed isn't a marketing gimmick — it's a quiet, consistent edge that most punters leave on the table. It won't turn a losing punter into a winning one, and it won't rescue a bad selection. But over a season of racing bets, taking the biggest guaranteed price every time is about as close to free money as British bookmaking gets.

Check the small print on your usual firm's caps, favour the early prices over SP, and stop ignoring the offer plastered across the top of every racecard you've ever opened. Your future self, counting slightly larger winnings, will thank you.

Gamble responsibly. If betting stops being fun, visit BeGambleAware.org.