"Is the Whirlpool Actually Worth Betting Into?"

Kingsley on SEN radio with racing.com. Segment courtesy of SEN x racing.com.

I get asked about the Whirlpool a lot. The questions have been coming through steadily for months, and the thinking behind them is usually the same: more money in the pool must mean a better bet. It doesn't work like that. Everything comes back to percentages and takeout, and once you look at it that way the Whirlpool offers very little value for most of the bets people want to make into it.

Why percentages decide it

The pool doesn't set the price. The takeout does. A tote pool has extra percentage built into it before a cent gets paid out, and that percentage has to come from somewhere. It comes out of your dividend. So when you see a favourite paying shorter on the tote than it is with the fixed odds bookmakers, that isn't bad luck on the day. That's the structure of the bet doing exactly what it's designed to do.

It's not a great look for racing when the fixed odds bookies are betting two dollars and the Whirlpool is paying a dollar forty or a dollar fifty. Same horse, same race, one price clearly worse than the other. Add the rounding on top and the favourites get squeezed further again. That's why you keep seeing them pay shorter than they should.

The one result everybody remembers

People bring up Gold Trip. The Whirlpool came in and paid overs and everyone remembers it. It was a couple of years back now, maybe three, and it still gets raised every time this comes up.

That's how memory works with betting. One big overs result sticks, and the hundreds of times the favourite paid short and the rounding quietly went against you don't. But the result you remember doesn't change the maths underneath. The takeout was the same that day as it is every other day. You just happened to be on the right side of a pool that moved.

A lot of the time with the roughies, the Whirlpool is just around about the price anyway. You're not getting a meaningful edge. You're getting a number that's close enough to what you could have had elsewhere, with a bigger chunk taken out before it got to you.

More money doesn't mean more value

Am I excited about more money going into a pool? Not really, when the takeout is that big. The majority of that money is coming from overseas, and it doesn't change the percentage you're betting into. A bigger pool is more turnover, not a better price. Those are two different things and they get confused constantly.

So the practical position is fairly simple. If you're a Saturday punter backing roughies, best tote is the way you go. If you're backing favourites, you take the fixed odds. That's not a complicated framework. It just requires you to check where the better number actually is instead of assuming the big pool must be the place to be.

Hopefully they get it right with the national pool. Until then, the question to ask before every bet is the same one: what am I actually being paid here, and is it more or less than I could get somewhere else. Compare the two prices, take the better one, and don't let the size of a pool talk you into a worse number.

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