Early price in horse racing
An early price is the fixed odds a bookmaker offers on a horse race on the morning of the race itself, which you can take and lock in before the starting price forms at the off. Take it and your bet settles at that number whatever the market does afterwards. Early prices usually go up between about 8am and 10am, depending on the bookmaker, and they sit between ante-post betting and the SP on the timeline of a racing day.
How an early price works on race day
An early price is a fixed-odds quote, so the sum behind it is the same as any other fractional price. A horse at 6/1 returns six units of profit per unit staked, and its implied probability is 1 ÷ (6 + 1), or roughly 14.3%. At 4/1 the implied figure is 20%.
What makes it an early price is timing rather than maths. Bookmakers publish their first odds for the day’s UK and Irish racing in the morning, and the window differs between firms: Sky Bet’s own rules say its early prices appear between 9.30am and 10.15am on weekdays and earlier on Saturdays, while other operators open from around 8am. That is a matter of house practice, not an industry standard, so the time on one site tells you nothing about another.
The margin does not vanish because the hour is early.
Add up the implied probabilities across a whole field in the morning and you will still get a total above 100%, and the excess is the bookmaker’s overround. Early books can look generous on individual runners because the firm is pricing before most of the money has arrived, but that is a judgement about one horse, not a discount on the book. Before calling any early price good, I work out the overround on the whole race first, because a fat book with one long price in it is still a fat book.
Early price, board price and SP compared
The term most often confused with an early price is the starting price, or SP. The SP is the official industry price at the moment the race starts, and a bet left at SP is settled at whatever that figure turns out to be. When you take an early price you are choosing a known number now over an unknown one later.
Board prices and ante-post
Some bookmakers draw a line late in the day: Sky Bet, for example, calls its fixed odds early prices until 15 minutes before the off and board prices after that. Ante-post is different again, covering bets struck days or weeks before a race, often before the final field is declared and usually on terms where a non-runner means a lost stake. Early-price bets on the day are normally struck on a non-runner, no bet basis, with any Rule 4 deduction applied to winning bets when another horse is withdrawn.
So the label matters less than the settlement terms printed against it.
Where Best Odds Guaranteed comes in
Take a worked example. You back a horse at an early price of 6/1 with a €20 stake. If it shortens to 4/1 SP and wins, you are paid at your 6/1: €120 profit plus the €20 stake, so €140 back, where the SP would have given you €100.
If the horse drifts to 8/1 instead, the early price costs you. You still collect €140, while an SP bet would have returned €180, and that €40 gap is the one scenario where locking in early leaves you short.
Best Odds Guaranteed exists to cover that drift.
Where a bookmaker runs BOG on a race, it pays the bigger of the price you took and the SP, so the 8/1 drift would be settled at 8/1 after all. The catch is that BOG terms differ between operators: many apply it only from a set time on the morning of the race, typically to win and each-way singles on UK and Irish racing, and some exclude particular markets or early-price bets altogether. Read the BOG terms on the site you use before treating the morning price as protected. And if you are staking a free bet, remember the usual rule still applies: winnings come back without the stake.
