By Matt Elliott

All serious punters know how important it is to get the very best price on bets. As I have mentioned on a number of occasions, winning is not about flipping more heads than tails as such, but more so a game of getting a price greater than 2.0 about your heads or tails selection.

Many punters betting through the totes have an unrealistic expectation of how much money it takes to move a price. Most overestimate the impact of a bet on the final tote dividend.

I have created a program that will calculate the impact of a bet on the price of a runner. This program will be especially helpful for those punters betting into races that attract limited sized pools such as in the greyhounds and Harness Racing. Even a $200 hundred dollar bet can affect the final price of your selection and as such, you are effectively betting against yourself.

The reduction in price will be reducing your overlay. The key point is to ensure that your bet size doesn't affect the tote dividend to a point where your bet is no longer a profitable one.

For the majority of punters, affecting your own dividend is not a consideration. It is generally only punters betting into low tote pools (such as those in the greyhounds, trots and some country meetings), that have to take this into consideration.

Most of the bigger punters betting into the big gallops pools I would imagine would be placing their bets with online corporate bookmakers such as Sports Acumen, IAS, and Dialabet to ensure they receive a good price on their selection.

The Best Odds Calculator will give you an excellent guide to the affect your bet will have on the tote pool you are betting into. However, naturally with any pari-mutuel system, the prices will fluctuate in the minutes and seconds before the jump. As such you will never know exactly the price you will receive; estimation is the best you can do.

It is also important to mention that the affect of your bet on the price won't be exact as per the calculator. The reason is because the tote dividends in Australia are rounded down to the nearest 10 cents and the Austote pools are rounded down to the nearest 5 cents. For example, with the Australian TAB, a runner should pay say 1.99, but, because of the rounding, the final dividend is rounded down to 1.9.

The steps for the use of this program are as follows . . .

1. Enter your bet size in the 'Bet Amount' cell
2. Enter the prices which you would like to compare in the odds column
3. Enter the approximate pool for the two tote based options
4. Enter your commission rate for both Betfair and Austote

Playing around with the program, you will discover how different bet sizes will affect the final dividends for the two tote based products.

The program also calculates the equivalent commission factored odds if you are betting with a betting exchange. For example, if you are on the highest commission rate of 5%, if you bet at odds of 5.4, once you take commission into account, the equivalent odds are 5.18. The commission factored price is very important to calculate to ensure that you get the best price. At first glance, the 5.4 does look to be a better price than say 5.2 being offered by a bookmaker. But, in this case, betting with the bookmaker would be preferred to betting with a betting exchange.

Using real examples, you will quite often find Austote to be the best option. If you are betting amounts of $100 or less, Austote may well be your best option more often than not.

I hope you find this program to be of great use. To download the program, click here.

M.E

This article is protected by international Copyright © Elk Publications Pty Ltd October 2004 Please contact if you wish to reproduce this article elsewhere.