Choosing a tipster in 2026: a UK guide to value, margin and the licensed bookmakers

Updated October 2026

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A “tipster” is a person or service that tells you what to back. Some are free, some charge a subscription, and most of what they sell has the same problem at its heart: nobody can know the outcome of a sporting event in advance. The trick, for a punter who actually wants to use tips rather than collect them, is to learn the difference between a tip and a value bet, to understand where the bookmaker’s margin sits inside every price, and to choose the bookmaker and the staking plan that let the work compound. This page is a guide, not a tip sheet. No picks are invented, no wins are promised, and the only recommendation a reader should walk away with is the one they make themselves once the numbers are in front of them.

Current as of 27 October 2026. Operator licence and offer details checked against the Gambling Commission’s public register and each operator’s own published terms.

Why “best” is a misnomer — and what to look for instead

The search for the best betting tipster is, in practice, a search for two things at once: a source of predictions a reader trusts enough to act on, and a bookmaker through which the bet actually gets placed. The two halves pull against each other. A tipster who posts a long winning streak matters only as far as the prices they were backed at; a sharp bookmaker with a thin margin matters only as far as the picks a reader can find. Settling on “best” without naming which of those a reader is solving for is how punters end up paying twice for the same mistake — a subscription for tips and a margin for the bookmaker, both of which are quietly eating the edge.

Three questions sharpen the search. First, what kind of sport or market is the tipster focused on: horse racing, football, cricket, golf, a US sport, an in-play niche? Second, are the tips sold or given away, and what does the tipster’s record look like once the price the bookmaker offered at the time of the bet is brought back in? Third, what does the bookmaker on the other end of the bet look like — licence, in-play product, cash out, payout speed — and how much of the staking plan the tipster assumes will still work at those prices?

The clusters below work through those questions in order: the shape of the UK market for tips, what the law says about who can take a bet, how responsible gambling tools sit alongside a tip subscription, where live betting changes the way a tip ages, the math of value and margin, and a comparison of ten Gambling Commission-licensed bookmakers on the factors a tipster subscriber actually meets in practice.

What a tipster actually is — and what they are not

A tipster, in plain British usage, is someone who publishes a selection: a horse at a price, a football side to win, an over on a totals line, a player to score first. Some tipsters work for free on social channels or in racing newspapers. Others charge a monthly or weekly fee, sometimes graded into bronze, silver and gold tiers. A few operate as part of a tipping community where members share selections, and some platforms now let users copy a tipster’s bets automatically into their own bookmaker account.

A tipster is not, and cannot be, a source of certainty. A price is the bookmaker’s view of an event plus a margin; a tip is somebody’s view of the same event; if the two agree, the tip is roughly worth taking, and if the tip offers a better price than reality, it is a value bet. Nobody can predict the outcome of a football match with enough accuracy to overcome a bookmaker’s margin on every single bet, and the tipster who claims they can is selling a story. The honest tipsters publish their record — number of bets, strike rate, return on investment — in a way that lets a reader check the math, including the price at which each bet was actually placed rather than the price at the moment the tip was written.

Free versus paid tipsters

A free tipster is, in practice, a content channel: a tip posted to a public feed, sometimes with a short write-up of the form, the team news or the going. A paid tipster sells a service, and the price of a subscription is a real cost that has to be made back from the bets before the subscriber is in profit. The same logic that asks whether a bookmaker’s price is fair asks whether a tipping subscription is worth its fee. A 12-month subscription at £25 a month costs £300 before a single bet is placed; the tipster’s record has to clear that £300 of subscription cost on top of whatever margin the bookmaker kept, and the calculation is rarely pretty.

A small number of platforms now offer tipster subscriptions with a money-back guarantee if the tipster’s record falls below a stated return. The fine print matters. Some refund only the subscription if the tipster finishes the period in the red; others measure the record against a flat one-unit stake per bet; a few quote a return on investment figure without showing the underlying bets. Where the platform is licensed by the Gambling Commission, the subscription itself sits outside the betting licence — it is content, not a bet — but the platform that places the bets on the subscriber’s behalf does hold a betting licence, and the rules around deposits, withdrawals and safer-gambling tools apply normally.

Tipping competitions and the lure of a leaderboard

Tipping competitions, where a community of punters posts their tips and a leaderboard tracks the winners, are a different product again. They reward short-term noise more than long-term judgement: a 100/1 winner on the first Saturday of the flat season will sit near the top of a monthly table whatever happens after it, and a 1/2 favourite that wins nine races in a row may not. Tipping competitions are useful for finding tipsters worth a longer look — a name that appears near the top of several monthly tables over a year is doing something right — but the leaderboard itself is not a record.

The legal frame: who can take a bet in Great Britain

The point of the law, for a punter using a tipster, is to know which bookmakers a tip can be placed with at all. In Great Britain the Gambling Commission licences the whole commercial market under the Gambling Act 2005, and since the Gambling (Licensing and Advertising) Act 2014 an operator whose remote facilities are used in Great Britain needs a Commission licence wherever it is based. A Curaçao, Maltese or Gibraltar licence is not a substitute: it is, by itself, no licence at all in the eyes of the Act for customers in England, Scotland and Wales.

The Commission’s public register is the whole test. It can be searched by business name, trading name, domain or account number, and any brand a reader is considering is one search away from being confirmed or struck off. Licensed operators use .com as well as .co.uk, so the domain alone proves nothing; a brand running on a .co.uk address is no more or less likely to be licensed than one running on a .com, and the only check is the register. Northern Ireland sits outside the Gambling Act 2005 and has its own older law, so a “GB licence” regulates the operator for England, Scotland and Wales — not Northern Ireland — and a bookmaker licensed by the Commission can still ask a Northern Irish customer to sign up under a different product.

A licence category matters at the margin. The Commission’s remote categories include general betting standard (real events), general betting standard (virtual events), general betting limited, pool betting and betting intermediary (the licence for betting exchanges). A tipster subscriber betting on football or horse racing will almost always be on a real-events licence; a virtual sports product, an esports line that is simulated rather than played, or an exchange requires a different category. The differences show up in the offer — some bookmakers hold a real-events licence but not a virtual licence, and their virtual tab will be empty — and not in the safer-gambling framework, which applies across the licences.

What the licence does — and does not — give the punter

A Gambling Commission licence gives a punter four things, and three of them are not obvious. It gives access to GAMSTOP, the national multi-operator online self-exclusion scheme that has been a mandatory licence condition for online operators since 31 March 2020. It gives access to a Commission complaints route, in the form of an approved alternative dispute resolution (ADR) body, when a bookmaker refuses a withdrawal or otherwise fails to honour its own terms. It gives the protection of the social responsibility code, including the financial vulnerability check that applies once a customer’s deposits minus withdrawals exceed £150 in a rolling 30 days — a public-record check rather than an income check or a credit reference check, but a check all the same. And it gives the operator a duty to verify the customer’s name, address and date of birth before the first deposit, including before a free bet or a bonus, a rule in force since 7 May 2019. There is no anonymous play at a licensed site.

What the licence does not give is a guarantee of fair prices. The bookmaker’s margin is set by the bookmaker, not by the Commission, and a licensed bookmaker is free to keep a thin margin on one market and a fat one on the next. The page returns to the margin in the cluster below on predictions and strategy.

Where the tipster sits, legally

A tipster who only publishes tips, free or paid, is not offering gambling — they are publishing content, and the content is regulated by consumer law rather than the Gambling Act. The line moves when a tipster platform starts placing bets on the subscriber’s behalf, as several modern copy-trading services do. A platform that opens a betting account on the subscriber’s behalf with a Commission-licensed bookmaker, or routes bets through the subscriber’s own account, becomes part of the betting chain and inherits some of the safer-gambling duties. A tipster selling picks on a Telegram channel is, broadly, a publisher; a tipster who also takes a cut of the punter’s losses may be a different thing again, and the Commission’s enforcement record over the last few years has chased exactly that boundary.

Safer gambling, the deposit limit and the punter’s own rules

The point of the safer-gambling section in a guide about tipsters is not to lecture a reader. It is to settle the relationship between a tip subscription and the rest of a punter’s bankroll before either one runs away. A tipster who tells a reader to stake £50 on every selection is not working with the same numbers as a reader staking £2; the same tip is good advice at one size and ruin at another. The licensed bookmakers on the comparison below all offer the safer-gambling tools this section describes, because they have to.

The deposit limit and how it bites

Operators must offer a customer-set deposit limit, set in advance, that applies to a fixed time frame. The first changes have applied since 31 October 2025, a second phase was postponed to 30 September 2026, and the rule’s effect in practice is that a punter cannot undo their own deposit limit without a cooling-off step. There is no state-set deposit or loss ceiling for betting: the ceiling is whatever the punter sets, and the point of the rule is to make the setting deliberate. A tipster subscriber should pick the deposit limit before the subscription starts, on the assumption that the first month is when discipline is hardest to keep.

The financial vulnerability check

The financial vulnerability check is in force once a customer’s deposits minus withdrawals cross £150 in a rolling 30 days. The check is a public-record look-up, not a credit reference check and not an income check. Bankruptcy, county court judgments and similar records are what the operator is looking at; a punter with a clean record will sail through it. The punter who is funding bets with borrowed money is the punter the rule is trying to find.

Financial risk assessments, the more thorough checks that some commentators call “affordability checks”, are a different step. They are announced in a staged plan, with a Commission article of 7 July 2026 setting out the timetable, and no start date for the more thorough checks has been published. The rule to take from this is that the check that catches a punter in trouble today is the £150 public-record check, and any tightening of the rules is a future, not a present.

Where to get help

GamCare runs the National Gambling Helpline. GambleAware funds treatment and education. The NHS runs a small number of gambling clinics. Gamblers Anonymous runs meetings in person and online. GAMSTOP, the multi-operator self-exclusion scheme, lets a punter block themselves from every licensed online operator in one sign-up, with periods of six months, one year, five years, or five years with auto-renewal, and after the minimum period the exclusion stays in place for a further seven years unless the customer asks GAMSTOP to remove it. None of these services is a tipster, and none of them will tell a reader which horse to back. They will, between them, take a punter’s call when a tip subscription is starting to feel like a debt repayment plan.

Live betting, cash out and the way a tip ages in play

A tip is a snapshot of an opinion at a moment in time, and the moment passes quickly. A football tip written at midday is a different bet by kick-off, because team news has come out, the price has drifted, and the bookmaker’s margin may have moved. An in-play tip is, in effect, a tip written against a market that has already moved; the punter is not placing a bet on the prediction so much as on the prediction of how the match will move from its current state.

The licensed bookmakers on the comparison below handle in-play differently, and the differences matter more than the marketing suggests. Some carry a deep in-play product with markets on the next goal, the next corner, the next card; some carry a thin one with only the match result and a couple of totals lines. Some show a margin in play that is wider than the pre-match margin — a fact the price displays as a smaller decimal number than the pre-match price for the same selection — and a tip written against a pre-match price can become a worse bet the moment the match kicks off.

Cash out as a discipline tool

Cash out is the bookmaker’s offer to settle a bet before the event has finished, at a price the bookmaker sets from its own model. A punter with a winning football acca can cash out before the last game kicks off, taking a smaller but guaranteed return; a punter with a horse racing single can cash out before the off, locking in a small loss or a small gain. Cash out is a discipline tool, not a profit tool, and its value is in stopping a punter from watching a winning position turn into a losing one because the last leg of an accumulator went wrong.

The price the bookmaker offers on a cash out is, in general, worse than the true value of the bet at that moment, because the bookmaker keeps a margin on the cash out as on any other market. A punter who takes every cash out offered is giving the bookmaker a small tax on every settlement, and the cumulative cost over a year of betting is not trivial. A punter who never takes a cash out is letting positions run all the way to the finish, with the obvious cost that a winning acca can be wiped out by a stoppage-time goal. The middle path — cashing out only when the alternative is a stake the punter cannot afford to lose — is the one most regular punters settle on, and it is the one a tipster’s record will not measure for them.

Where the tip ages fastest

Three kinds of tip age badly. The first is a football tip written before the line-ups are out: a key absence that comes out an hour before kick-off will move the price, and the tip written at midday can be worthless by 2pm. The second is a horse racing tip written on yesterday’s going: a change in the going at a racecourse can move the price of every horse in the race, and a tip that looked good on good to firm can be a poor bet on soft. The third is any in-play tip written without a model of how the market is likely to move: by the time the punter reads the tip, the bookmaker’s price has already adjusted, and the edge the tipster saw has been arbitraged away by the bookmaker’s own traders.

Value, margin and the math of a tip that pays

A value bet is a bet whose odds are higher than the true probability of the outcome, once the bookmaker’s margin is taken out. The concept is simple and the practice is hard, because the true probability of any sporting event is never known exactly, and the bookmaker’s margin sits invisibly inside every price on every market. Two mechanics do most of the work: the way margin distorts a price, and the way a punter can read the margin back out of the price once it is on the screen.

How margin sits inside a two-way price

Take a two-way market priced at 1.90 / 1.90 in decimal odds — what a fractional punter would call 9/10 each way, a slight favourite in either direction. The margin of that market is straightforward to work out: the payout share of the market, which is what a unit staked returns across both outcomes in the long run, is

1 / (1/1.90 + 1/1.90) = 0.95, or 95%.

The bookmaker keeps the other 5% of every unit bet on this market as gross margin before costs. For a balanced book on this two-way market, 95p of every £1 staked across both sides comes back as winnings in the long run and 5p stays with the bookmaker.

That 5% is a band, not a single number. A bookmaker quoting 1.85 / 1.95 on the same market is keeping a different margin on each side, and the effective margin of the whole market is whatever the two prices add up to once inverted. A bookmaker quoting 1.80 / 2.00 is keeping a much fatter margin on the favourite than on the underdog, and a tipster who only tips favourites on this market is paying that fat margin on every selection. A bookmaker quoting 1.95 / 1.95 is keeping a thinner margin than 1.90 / 1.90, and a tipster who can find prices at 1.95 / 1.95 on similar selections has a real edge to work with.

The same math works for three-way markets. A typical football 1X2 market quoted at 2.10 / 3.40 / 3.50 is keeping roughly 5% of every unit staked across the three outcomes; a market at 1.90 / 3.20 / 4.00 on the same match may keep 8% or more. A tipster who posts a record of winners without saying which side of the margin the bets were on is asking the punter to take the math on faith.

Reading margin from a price

A short cut for a single price: a price of 2.00 in decimal is a market that sees this outcome as a 50% chance, before the margin. A price of 3.00 sees it as a 33% chance. A price of 1.50 sees it as a 67% chance. Divide 1 by the decimal price to get the implied probability, then add the implied probabilities of all the outcomes on the market to get the overround. An overround of 1.05 is a 5% margin; an overround of 1.08 is an 8% margin. The overround is what the bookmaker keeps; the rest is what comes back to the punter.

This is the lens a tipster record has to be read through. A tipster with a 30% return on investment at 1.80 average odds is one kind of tipster; the same 30% return at 2.50 average odds is a much better one, because the higher average odds imply that the tipster is finding value rather than grinding out small edges at short prices. A tipster who only ever posts favourites at 1.30 or shorter is paying a margin on a market that is hard to beat even with a strong record.

Why no tip is ever certain

A tip is a probability call, not a forecast. A tipster who says a horse is “a certainty” is selling certainty the bookmaker’s price already says is not there. A 1/3 favourite wins roughly two out of three times; a 1/5 favourite wins roughly five out of six. The shorter the price, the more the punter needs the tip to be right to make the bet worthwhile once the margin is taken out, and the smaller the upside when it is. A tipster who never tips anything shorter than 2/1 is, in effect, refusing to play in the most heavily margined part of the market, and a tipster who only ever tips 5/2 shots on five-race accumulators is asking the accumulator math to do the work the tipster’s strike rate cannot.

The honest framing is that no tip is certain, that a tip’s value depends on the price at which the bet is placed, and that a tipster’s record is the only honest measure of their skill. The bookmaker’s margin is the constant drag on every bet; the tipster’s edge, if any, is what the punter is paying the subscription to find.

The return on a single bet

For a single bet at decimal odds, the return on a winning bet is the stake multiplied by the odds. Stake £10 at decimal odds of 3.75 and a winning bet returns £37.50, of which £27.50 is profit and £10 is the returned stake. At fractional odds the same bet is 11/4: stake £10 at 11/4 and a winning bet returns £37.50 (£27.50 profit plus the £10 stake). The fractional and decimal forms are two ways of saying the same thing: decimal = fractional numerator divided by fractional denominator plus one, so 11/4 → 11 ÷ 4 + 1 = 3.75.

For a combination bet the odds of the legs multiply into one price. A double at 3.00 and 2.50 is a 7.50 shot: stake £10, winning return £75, profit £65. An accumulator at 2.00, 3.00, 4.00 and 5.00 is 120.0: a winning £10 acca returns £1,200, profit £1,190. The longer the accumulator, the higher the price, and the smaller the chance every leg comes in. A four-fold at 120.0 needs every one of four selections to win, and the cumulative probability of that happening is roughly one in 120 at fair prices, lower once the bookmaker’s margin is taken out.

Ten Gambling Commission-licensed bookmakers compared

The ten operators below all hold a remote general betting standard (real events) licence on the Commission’s public register, which is the only test the Act applies. The order is not a ranking: each operator has features the others do not, and a tipster subscriber looking for a particular product will find their best fit somewhere different on the list. The table that follows summarises the licences and what each operator’s own terms say about the subject of this page — tipster-friendly features, in-play product, cash out, the in-play stat feeds that a tipster subscriber can use to check a tip in real time. What the table does not show is the bookmaker’s margin, which varies market by market, and the customer service experience, which a reader will form a view on faster than any table can.

Several themes sit across the table. The Bet Builder feature — a same-game multi that lets a punter combine selections from a single match into one bet — is now standard across the licensed set, with NetBet, BetMGM, Betfred, Unibet and Fitzdares all advertising one. Best Odds Guaranteed on UK and Irish horse racing, which pays out at the starting price if that is higher than the price taken, is offered by BetVictor and Unibet and is the closest thing to a value pick on a racing book. Live streaming of racing is offered by BetVictor, DragonBet, Unibet and others, with the licensing wrinkle that UK and Irish racing streams typically require a funded account or a qualifying bet. In-play is universal; the depth of the in-play product, the margin in play and the speed of the price updates are where the operators really differ, and they are features the table cannot measure.

What the table does not show

The table is a snapshot of features each operator chooses to advertise. Three things a tipster subscriber cares about are not in it, and a reader should not assume their absence.

The first is margin. Every operator on the list keeps a margin, and the margin varies market by market. A bookmaker with a 3% margin on the English Premier League 1X2 market is offering a better price than one with a 5% margin on the same match, and the difference compounds over a year of betting. Some operators publish an overround on their racing and football markets; most do not, and the punter has to back-calculate it from the prices shown.

The second is payout speed. A punter whose staking plan depends on being able to recycle winnings inside a week will not get the same service from a bookmaker that holds withdrawals for a review as from one that pays out the same day. None of the operators above publishes a single number that captures this; the experience is in the small print of each operator’s withdrawal terms.

The third is the affiliate and tipping ecosystem. Unibet runs the Unibet Community, where tipsters post free picks to a public feed and the platform tracks the leaderboard. Sky Bet runs free-to-play predictor games, where a correct prediction of a full slate of matches wins a free bet. Betfred integrates Racing Post data and tips into its app. These are not bookmaker features in the usual sense, but they are the closest a tipster subscriber gets to the tipster service inside the bookmaker’s own product, and the table cannot capture them.

A note on offshore bookmakers and unlicensed brands

A bookmaker running on a Curaçao, Maltese or Gibraltar licence but no Gambling Commission licence is not licensed to take bets from customers in Great Britain. The Act treats providing gambling facilities in Great Britain without the licence the Act requires as an offence aimed at the operator, with a sentence on summary conviction of up to 51 weeks’ imprisonment, a fine up to level 5, or both, and six months in Scotland. A customer who bets on an unlicensed site commits no offence under the Act, but the customer also gets none of the protections the Act sets up: no GAMSTOP coverage, no Commission complaints route, no approved alternative dispute resolution, no British consumer redress if funds are withheld, no binding by the 10x bonus wagering cap, and no application of the £150 financial vulnerability check.

Enforcement against unlicensed operators is disruption, not blocking: cease-and-desist notices, search-engine referrals, work with registrars, hosts and payment providers. The Commission has been given, or is about to receive, court-order DNS blocking powers, but no general ISP block on unlicensed sites is in force. The honest framing is the one the comparison above works from: a licensed bookmaker is one whose name appears on the Commission’s public register, and the register is one search away.

Finding a tipster who is worth following

The rest of the page has set up the legal frame, the safer-gambling tools, the live betting mechanics, the math of margin and value, and the licensed bookmakers a tip can be placed with. The last piece is the tipster subscription itself, and there is a short list of things a punter should check before paying for one.

First, the record. A tipster’s published record should show every bet, the date and time the tip was published, the price at which the bet was actually placed, the result and the running profit and loss in units. A record that shows only winners, or one that reports the price at the moment of settlement rather than the moment of the bet, is not a record a punter can audit. The strike rate alone is not enough; a 50% strike rate at 1.50 prices is unprofitable, and a 25% strike rate at 4.00 prices is highly profitable.

Second, the staking plan. A tipster who recommends level stakes and a starting bank is easier to follow than one whose staking plan depends on the punter’s own judgment. Some tipsters publish a Kelly fraction stake, which sizes each bet to the perceived edge, and that staking plan only works if the tipster’s edge is real and stable. A punter with a small bank should use level stakes, ignore Kelly, and accept a smaller return in exchange for a longer run of betting before ruin.

Third, the price. The tipster’s record should report the price at which the bet was taken, not the price at the time the tip was written, and the difference can be large. A tipster writing “back this at 3.0 or better” on Saturday morning and getting 2.8 by the time the punter reads it is a tipster whose record does not match the punter’s bet. The best tipsters take their own price early and report the actual price, and the punter who follows should do the same.

Fourth, the subscription terms. A 12-month subscription at £25 a month is £300 of cost before a single bet is placed, and the tipster’s record over the period has to clear that £300 of subscription cost on top of the bookmaker’s margin before the punter is in profit. A monthly subscription that can be cancelled at any time is a different product, and a tipster with a money-back guarantee if the record falls below a stated return is a third. The terms matter as much as the tipster’s record.

Frequently asked questions

How do you become a betting tipster?

A betting tipster is anyone who publishes a tip, and at the simplest end that means writing up selections on a free blog, a Telegram channel, a subreddit or a betting community. A paid tipster is a small business: the operator charges a subscription, often through a tipping platform that handles payment and provides record-keeping, and in the UK the platform that places bets on the subscriber’s behalf holds a Gambling Commission licence. Anyone can become a tipster; the harder part is becoming a tipster whose record is in profit once the price at which each bet is taken is brought back in.

Who is the best betting tipster?

There is no single “best” tipster, and any service claiming to be one is selling certainty that does not exist. A tipster’s record is the only honest measure of their skill, and a good record is one that shows every bet, the price at which each bet was taken, the stake and the running profit and loss in units. The best tipster for a given punter is the one whose record holds up against audit, whose staking plan matches the punter’s bankroll and whose prices match the prices the punter can actually get at the bookmaker.

What is a tipster in betting?

A tipster in betting is a person or service that publishes a selection — a horse at a price, a football side to win, a totals line — for other people to back. A tip is an opinion, not a forecast, and the value of a tip depends on the price at which the bet is placed and the bookmaker’s margin on the market. A tipster is not the same as a bookmaker, a betting exchange or a financial adviser, and a tipster’s record is the only honest measure of their skill over a large enough sample of bets.

What is a value bet, and why is no tip ever certain?

A value bet is a bet whose odds are higher than the true probability of the outcome, once the bookmaker’s margin is taken out. The true probability of a sporting event is never known exactly, and the bookmaker’s margin sits inside every price, so a value bet is always an estimate rather than a certainty. A tip is a probability call, not a forecast: a 1/3 favourite wins roughly two out of three times, and a tipster who claims a horse is “a certainty” is selling certainty the bookmaker’s price already says is not there. The only honest way to measure a tipster’s skill is by the long-run profit and loss of following their tips at the prices the bookmaker actually offered.

What is the bookmaker’s margin and how can it be seen in the odds?

The bookmaker’s margin is the share of every unit staked on a market that the bookmaker keeps in the long run, and it sits invisibly inside every price. For a two-way market at decimal odds of 1.90 / 1.90, the payout share — what a unit staked returns across both outcomes — is 1 ÷ (1/1.90 + 1/1.90) = 0.95, or 95%, and the bookmaker’s margin is the other 5%. For a three-way 1X2 football market at 2.10 / 3.40 / 3.50, the implied probabilities are roughly 47.6%, 29.4% and 28.6%, adding to 1.056. The bookmaker’s margin is around 5.6%. A punter can read the margin from any market by dividing 1 by each decimal price to get the implied probability, then adding the implied probabilities of every outcome on the market to get the overround, and subtracting 1 from the overround to see what the bookmaker keeps as margin.

How is the return on a bet worked out from the stake and the odds?

The return on a single winning bet is the stake multiplied by the decimal odds. Stake £10 at decimal odds of 3.75 and a winning bet returns £37.50, of which £27.50 is profit and £10 is the returned stake. At fractional odds the same bet is 11/4, and the return is stake plus stake times the fractional numerator divided by the fractional denominator. For a combination bet the odds of the legs multiply into one price, so a double at 3.00 and 2.50 is a 7.50 shot: stake £10, winning return £75, profit £65. The return is a single number from the formula; the chance of the bet winning is a separate question that no formula can answer.

Content created by the «Bookies Trust» team