There are a vast array of bookmakers that all want to earn your custom and they try to find ways to woo you away from their competitors. Some offer price boosts, giving you higher returns than with their standard odds. Other have regular offers for their most loyal customers. Some do both of those things and more besides.
One of the ever more popular methods of trying to curry your favour is to guarantee you the best odds on horse racing and greyhound racing. This is the promise that I want to tell you about on this page, especially as taking bookies up on it is a good idea if you’re the sort of person who places bets on a regular basis. Why not make sure you’re getting the best odds around?
Best BOG Offers For Racing
What Is Best Odds Guaranteed?
This is one of the easiest offers to understand out of all of the deals in play at the moment. If you place an offer with a bookie that has a Best Odds Guaranteed promise and the starting price of the horse or dog that you bet on ends up being higher than it was when you placed the bet then you’ll get paid out at the higher price.
Now every bookmaker will have their own rules and regulations when it comes to their BOG offer, but that’s the general principle. The idea is that they don’t want you to feel that you should take your business elsewhere, so they promise that you won’t regret betting with them and that, hopefully, will result in you continuing to use them over a rival.
Common Best Price Guarantee Terms
As I’ve just said, some bookmakers have different rules from others about how this offer is applied. Virtually all of the bookies who operate to a British market and have a Best Odds Guarantee apply it to all UK and Irish events. Some will cover both horse racing and dog racing, others will only cover the dogs and others will do just the horses. That’s something worth finding out about depending on your favourite sport.
As with every offer out there, make sure you find out if there’s a minimum stake you need to place in order to get the BOG. Some smaller operators have, for example, a minimum stake of £10, with £5 Each Way being acceptable.
Most betting sites require you to place your bet after around 9am or 10am on the day of the race that you’re betting on, so bets placed in advance (ante-post) won’t be protected by the guarantee. It is important to check this and keep this in mind, if you place a bet at 8:50am and BOG does not start until 9am then the fact you placed a bet 10 minutes early could mean you miss out on better odds if the price drifts out.
Some companies only offer the guarantee on single bets, so that’s something to bear in mind if you’re a fan of accumulators. Others will cover both single and multiple bets with their guarantee as long as they’re placed online. They’ll pay out at the bigger price compared to Early and Board Prices.
Some bookies have a maximum amount that they’ll pay through their Best Odds Guarantee. That’s not the same as normal maximum returns, though. As an example, let’s say that you’ve placed a bet and the odds you placed would have seen a return of £70,000 but the BOG sees that shoot up to £130,000. In that case there’s an ‘uplift’ of £60,000 but if the bookie has a maximum return of £50,000 then you’ll only get paid £120,000.
There aren’t many restrictions in place on this offer, though it’s worth noting that you won’t get the guarantee on post betting, tote pools, pari-mutuel betting or enhanced accumulators with most bookmakers.
Best Odds Guaranteed Plus
It’s obvious, really, but given this was a way of bookmakers trying to bring in business it was no surprise that once one started doing it so did others. As soon as that happened those clever so-and-sos had to device an even better way of bringing in and then keeping hold of the punters. That’s where the Best Odds Guaranteed Plus offer comes in. But what is it? And is one better than the other?
Essentially, Best Odds Guaranteed Plus is the same as the Best Odds Guarantee I’ve already described but with an added price boost. Not only will you get paid at a better price you’ll find that your odds are enhanced even further.
Let’s say that you took a price of 5/1 on a horse. When the race started its Starting Price (SP) was 7/1. The other bookmakers that have a BOG will pay you out at the 7/1 SP, whilst Ladbrokes will boost the price they pay out on to 15/2.
It’s fairly standard practice for bookmakers to not offer either type of Best Odds Guarantee on in-play betting, instead limiting it to bets placed before the race starts.
Getting The Most Out Of Best Odds Guarantee
The idea behind the Best Odds Guarantee is a simple enough one and is designed to get people to place their bets early. The earlier punters have placed their bets, the more of an idea about the market that the bookmakers will have, allowing them to balance the books as best they can. Put simply, BOG offers say that if you take a fixed price and the Starting Price ends up being higher, you’ll be paid out at the Starting Price rather than the price that you took. You don’t need to do anything, with bookies sorting it all out for you when they pay out. To take advantage of BOG you have to take the fixed price when you place a bet not the SP.
The fact that you don’t need to do anything, bar making sure that you place your bet with a bookmaker that offers the Best Odds Guarantee and on a race that is featuring the promotion, means that you can often be on the receiving end of a pleasant surprise when you log back into your betting account and discover that you’ve been paid out more than you were expecting to be. Whilst you don’t need to do anything, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t still a few things that you should think about and bare in mind with regards to the promotion.
Does Your Bookie Of Choice Offer It?
The most important thing that you need to do is to find out whether or not your bookmaker offers the Best Odds Guarantee and, if so, which races it is offered on. That’s not to say that you should change your mind about the race that you’re betting on in order to take advantage of a BOG offer, but it does mean that you should think about which bookie you place your bets with. Most people will have several different bookies that they use depending on what they’re betting on, so if one company offers BOG on the races you’re betting on and one doesn’t, go with the one that does.
It might sound obvious, but given the manner in which most of us use so many bookmakers all of the time and tend to do so naturally, it can completely escape our attention that one offers a promotion that we could take advantage of and another one doesn’t. Imagine for a moment that you’re planning on betting £100 on a horse with odds of 3/1. That means that your payout if it wins would by £300, plus your stake back. A bookie with the Best Odds Guarantee offer in place ends up paying out at 5/1 because that was the horse’s Starting Price.
In this instance, you’ve potentially missed out on £200 if the horse wins by going with a bookmaker that doesn’t have a BOG offer available. Do that several times and you’ll have missed out on a decent whack, soon realising that there’s a reason it’s worth keeping your eyes peeled for which offers and promotions bookies have running at any given moment. It is an easy enough thing to do, but picking the right bookmaker to place your bet with can be the difference between a very healthy looking bankroll and one that could do with a boost.
Think About What You’re Betting On
There are numerous different types of bettor, but the most common two are those that bet on a whim and those that think long and hard about what they’re betting on. The former category is one that you should try to avoid finding yourself in, given that it will see you lose more money than you’ll win over the long-term. Of course, no matter how much I might try to steer you away from being an impulsive bettor, if you are one then there’s not much that is going to dissuade you from doing what you’ve always done and what you know.
All I can say instead is that you should think about what it is that you’re impulsively betting on. Look for the greyhound and horse races that have the Best Odds Guarantee attached to them for the simple reason that your impulse bet could be rewarded with a greater payout if you do. If you’re the more sensible sort that thinks long and hard about what you bet on, you shouldn’t alter your bet in order to take advantage of a Best Odds Guarantee, but you should certainly make sure that you do so if you were betting on that race anyway.
Look Out When The Big Events Come About
It is common for bookmakers to only offer the Best Odds Guarantee on specific races, as well as only being available on bets placed on the day of the event in question. Typically speaking, ante-post bets will not receive the benefits offered by BOG promotions, with the risk-reward being that you get higher odds in the first place. This can change when big events roll around, however, with races such as the Grand National or meetings like the Cheltenham Festival sometimes having the Best Odds Guarantee applied to them.
This is because all bookies will cover these events and they know that they need to do something special to win your custom. As a result, it is not unheard of for BOG offers to apply to bets placed a few days before the event, though it would be untrue to say that this is a common occurrence. As a punter, your job is to do what you can to ensure that get the best deals possible from your bookmaker of choice and this includes keeping an eye out for when certain promotions are available. The Best Odds Guarantee offer is one of the best around, so make sure you use it when you can.
As always, the sensible thing to do is to read the terms and conditions of your chosen bookmaker and weigh up the pros and cons of placing a specific bet with them at a given time. The whole point of the Best Odds Guarantee is that you get paid out at the best odds available, but don’t forget that ante-post odds will often be better than any odds you’re offered on the day of a race. Avoiding placing an ante-post wager in order to take advantage of the BOG off might well prove to be a false economy, so be wary of that.
