Salisbury
Whenever I see Salisbury on the card it reminds me of a document that Betfair published many moons ago.
I saw Salisbury on the card today and the same bell rang in my head, but also a bit of alarm at the two and three runner races on the card! How poor is that? But back to the main topic.
Back in 2004 Betfair issued a document that actually clearly laid out what a market looked like. In the document they looked at a horse race and showed how many people placed back bets only, how many laid only and how many did both; trading in other words. The market they looked at was a race at Salisbury on 4th September 2003, the 16:15.
According to the Betfair document, on this particular race 3154 people had been active on the race and staked matched bets of £676k. The interesting thing is that 17% of accounts did both, they traded it. By volume it accounted for nearly 50% of the entire market. It would be really interesting to see what the figured is nowadays, but I doubt we’ll ever get to know.
This year the same race was a group three and turned over £836k. It’s difficult to work out exactly how the improved status of the race has affected matched bet turnover, but you may want to lop off 20% for that. Doing this would bring it back down to the level a decade ago. That’s a little subjective, but probably fair.
Anyhow, I thought I’d share this information with you. Now, back to these tiny fields!
Category: Horse Racing
