Racehorse TALK

Again Phil's great site comes to the rescue.

What would we do without him?

http://www.justracing.com.au/thoroughbreds.php?catid=28

Another article which may help, this one with more words and less tables:

http://bigcitybanker.blogspot.com/2007/08/art-of-bookmaking.html

Peter it is the sum of the percentage for each runner by dividing each dividend for a $1 unit into 100 eg $4.00 equals 25%. Five horses in a race all paying $4.00 is a 125% market, add another three horses all paying $100 (1%)and it is a 128% market.

The best way to understand its affect is at 128% you would have to proportionally stake $128 on all runners to collect $100, hence if you did you would lose $28.

Similarly at a higher percentage of 150% you would have to stake $150 to guarantee a collect of $100 and therefore lose $50.

The higher the market percentage the worse off punters are, but Bookies can still lose even if they are betting high percentages as it depends if they have layed the winner disproportionally to the rest of the field.

Pete you are obviously an NZedder and have been brought up in a country where Bookies do not exist, you will notice there is always a lot of comment about the Bookies Percentages but hardly any (if any at all) about tote percentages, not sure about NZ but most countries where there is a monopoly the take out from the win and place pools is much greater than Australia as they think Punters are fair game, the Overseas Totes I believe take something like 25%( from memory of something I read as I never bet on overseas racing) and if they round down like the Australian TAB's do then they would be betting closer to 130% or even higher, which would make it very hard if not impossible for the average punter to win, if Bookies ever disappeared here that is what would most likely happen

getting back to your original question all things being equal if a Bookie is betting to a 100% market he should  break even on the race, anything over this and that is his profit, a fair percentage would be between 112% and 115% again it depends on how much the Bookie is holding on the race as to how close he can get to those percentages, if there were only a 100 people on course and they all settled on the one horse and he couldn't lay the field equally then you would find the percentages way out of wack, in a race like the Doncaster where there will be substantial amounts of money for all horses in the race the Percentages will get down fairly low, maybe even under 110% at times