Horse racing punters may need to brace themselves for further betting changes

Times for the racing punter are changing, with two significant trading decisions having been made in recent days that are likely to have implications for many people who enjoy backing horses.

From the start of this week Paddy Power and the Betfair Sportsbook started offering their own prices right until the off rather than relying on the traditional show of prices generated by the average odds from a selected group of on-course boards.

So if a punter sees a show of betting on television they might now be able to access better prices with Paddy Power or Betfair, albeit the horse they fancy might also be shorter or the same as the show.

There is a logic to what the sister firms have decided to do. It is odd that all off-course bookmakers offer their own prices on a Southwell claimer from around 5pm the previous day only to all fall into line when the first show appears.

Apart from greyhounds there is no other event that is bet on in this way, and if all firms follow the Paddy Power-Betfair lead it means shopping around for the best price will continue right until a race starts and theoretically there will be more value than is currently the case in the minutes before the off.

In reality some other firms are already tweaking show prices occasionally in order to avoid arbs that are created when the odds on the screen are bigger than those available on the Betfair exchange.

Thankfully punters who take a price with Paddy Power or Betfair will not miss out if the starting price is bigger because the best odds guarantee will still apply, so this should spell good news for those punters who have unrestricted accounts with full access to all standard concessions.

A spokesman for the company referred to being able to offer odds that are “more reflective of the overall betting market”, which illustrates a feeling in the industry that the way races are traded on course, even though that largely mirrors exchange activity, is not considered adequate in the current landscape.

If the prospect of greater choice of odds and therefore better value is a positive development, less exciting is the news BetVictor have stopped offering Lucky 15s, Lucky 31s and Lucky 63s.

The most popular of these wagers is the Lucky 15, which consists of singles, doubles, trebles and a fourfold on four selections with the carrot of double the odds if only one leg wins.

The trouble for BetVictor is that it is not a profitable wager for them to lay, particularly as of last Saturday when someone won £486,014.88 off a £2 Lucky 31 with them.

BetVictor scrap 'Lucky' bets after paying out £486,000 to small-stakes punter

That was, it seems, the final straw and BetVictor’s customers can no longer place these wagers, although if they want to do so without the double-odds concession they can place a yankee plus four singles.

It means recreational punters suffer, but as things stand BetVictor are the only company to pull the plug on what is one of the core multiples, and hopefully that will remain the case.

However, the Lucky 15 was invented as a way of enticing people to place high-margin multiple bets in shops with an attractive bonus.

These days it is increasingly targeted by people with the technical ability to pounce, often with the use of bots, when four horses are either arbs or nearly arbs against the Betfair exchange price, and that means with the double-odds offer for a single winner the odds are stacked in their favour.

Further changes to how punters are able to bet on racing, including potential alterations to the margin, could materialise in the new year.
Racing’s rights holders, facing a shortfall in revenue due to the widespread closure of betting shops, are asking bookmakers for a share of their turnover on the sport in order to allow access to live pictures.

This would make the facility to lay bets on racing more expensive and could impact on punters in terms of less competitive margins and the removal of features like the best odds guarantee.

It is hard to avoid the nagging feeling that for those people who do not have their stakes limited there will never be as good a time to be a racing punter as the decade that is about to end.

Surprising that daredevil goalies don’t suffer more injuries

Life continues to mystify me in so many ways. Why is Mike Dean not feted as Britain’s greatest sports official of all time? Why is Mrs Brown’s Boys so popular? Who is more worthy of disdain – train passengers taking up a seat with their bag while others are standing or those who are standing because they are too meek to ask people to move their bag?

And, most of all, why do more goalkeepers not get injured while diving around? This has stumped me throughout my life ever since as a young kid I saw the likes of Gary Sprake, Peter Shilton and Sepp Maier hurling themselves through the air in a bid to stop the ball going into their net.

If I launched myself sideways at maximum force on a patch of grass more than half a dozen times I would expect to break either an arm or some ribs, and yet every week goalies around the world must do this hundreds of thousands of times without the slightest mishap.

But two weekends ago the impression that keepers have some kind of magic powers was shattered as Spurs stopper Hugo Lloris suffered a serious arm injury during the act of trying to prevent a Brighton goal.

It was a poor piece of keeping but not so poor that he deserved the agony that ensued. Instead of palming a misplaced cross over the bar he parried it back into play and Neal Maupay nipped in to score. In attempting to block Maupay’s shot Lloris fell awkwardly and dislocated his elbow.

It still amazes me that such injuries are not more common, and the way keepers soften the impact as they hit the ground with clever use of their arm is one of the most underrated skills in football.

Hard to know what edge rugby 'spy' could have gained

Bewildering news from the rugby union World Cup, where England coach Eddie Jones claims his team’s training session was spied on.

England meet New Zealand in the first semi-final on Saturday morning and Jones said the session was filmed from a nearby apartment.

Given that the team’s training pitch is surrounded by even more flats than Newbury racecourse it would not be difficult for a member of the New Zealand team looking to gain a vital edge to have gained footage of what the enemy were up to, although Jones admits it might just have been a Japanese fan.

“I don’t care,” he added, quickly quelling a potential repeat of last year’s infamous spying scandal involving Leeds and Derby.

And nor should he. After all, what exactly could a spy learn from watching rugby players train? It’s a pretty basic game. They pass the ball to the nearest teammate, hoof it upfield or charge at the opposition in the hope of benefiting from a missed tackle.

And they spend ages messing around in scrums, so all in all it’s hard to know what a spy’s dossier might contain, save from the odd fairly unimportant clues about potential lineout strategies.

If New Zealand end England’s World Cup dreams this weekend it is far likelier to be because they played better rugby or enjoyed more luck in the seemingly random awarding of penalties rather than because someone filmed Jones’s side training.

Ambivalence to diving plague it totally wrong

David McGoldrick was booked for a blatant and pathetic dive for Sheffield United against Arsenal on Monday.

It was truly depressing how little criticism he received from the
Sky commentary team for his poor-quality attempt to cheat the referee.

Diving continues to be treated as just part of the game, yet if there is the slightest possibility that the referee has made an innocent error commentators suddenly get tremendously excited. It’s so wrong.

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