Board price in racing
A board price is the fixed odds on offer for a horse or greyhound shortly before the off, originally the figure chalked or displayed on the boards of on-course bookmakers. If you take it when you strike the bet, your bet is settled at that price whatever happens to the market afterwards. If you take nothing, you get the starting price instead. Online, the same idea appears as the board or show price that replaces the early price in the final minutes before a race.
Where the board price comes from
The term starts on the racecourse. On-course bookmakers post odds against each runner, and those odds move with the weight of money in the ring, sometimes several times in the space of a few minutes. The Jockey Club’s glossary describes board prices as the generally available odds on those on-course boards, and notes that the starting price is derived from them.
That link matters more than it first looks.
The SP is not a separate market. It is a snapshot of the board prices as the race begins, taken by SP reporters and passed to off-course bookmakers for settlement. So the board price is the live, moving number, and the SP is the last frame of that film, frozen at the off. Taking the board price means fixing your odds at the moment you bet; leaving it means accepting whatever the frame shows when the stalls open.
How it shows up on your betslip
Online bookmakers usually split race-day odds into stages. Early prices are compiled by the bookmaker’s own traders and go up on the morning of racing. Then, in roughly the last ten to fifteen minutes, the odds on screen switch to board or show prices that track the on-course market. Sky Bet’s published horse racing rules, for example, say that once a race is inside fifteen minutes of the off, the prices shown as alternatives to SP are called board prices.
The exact cut-off and naming differ from one operator to the next, so read the racing rules of the site you use rather than assuming a standard. Some call it a show price, some a board price, and the switch time is set by each bookmaker.
Take a horse at 5/1 on the board. The implied probability is 1 ÷ (5 + 1), or about 16.7%. A €10 win bet at that price returns €60, including your stake, if the horse wins, and that sum is locked in even if the horse is sent off at 3/1. Add up the implied probabilities across the whole field and the total comes to more than 100%; the excess is the bookmaker’s margin, or overround, and a board price carries it just as an early price does.
Board price bets are normally settled on a non-runner no bet basis, so a late withdrawal can trigger a Rule 4 deduction from your winnings.
Board price, SP or Tote: which settles your bet?
The term most often confused with board price is the starting price itself, and the difference comes down to timing. A board price is fixed when you place the bet. The SP is set at the off and only known after the race has started, so a bet at SP is a bet on a number you have not seen yet.
Neither is better in general. If the horse drifts from 5/1 to 8/1, the board price has cost you; if it shortens to 3/1, the board price has paid. Many bookmakers in Ireland and Britain offer Best Odds Guaranteed on selected races, which settles a winning bet at whichever is bigger, the price you took or the SP. Whether it applies, and on which races, varies by operator and is set out in their terms, so check before you assume the protection is there.
The Tote is a different animal altogether.
Pool betting does not offer a board price at all: your return is a dividend worked out after the race from the total pool, less the operator’s deduction, divided by the stakes on the winner. What I check first when a reader asks about a disappointing return is which of the three was actually on the docket, because a bet struck at SP by default is the most common surprise.
