What the Betfair Market Tells You About the Horses You Hate

Recorded December 2025 for 6 Months of TKZ: The REAL Results Exposed + What's Coming in 2026 🔥. Any figures mentioned are from that time.

The gap between the horses I like and the horses I don't

I do a lot of work on the Betfair starting price market, and one thing it keeps telling me is that the horses I don't like are not a free kick. When I look at my ratings split into the top end and the bottom end, the horses I like came in at plus 6% taken at top fixed odds. The horses I don't like, the official lays, lose 13% if you back them at top fixed odds. That is over 5,798 bets, so it is a decent sample size. The difference between the two ends is around 19 to 19.5%. That gap is the whole job. Making it bigger is what I am always striving to do.

Why the top price figure flatters the lays

If you are a bookie and you lay all those horses I don't like at top price from 9.30 in the morning, you are winning 13%. That sounds like easy money. It isn't, because top fixed odds in the morning is not where those horses end up. When I run the same lays through Betfair starting price, the loss on backing them is only 2%. Not 13%. Two percent.

So the horses I don't like drift. That is what the numbers prove. They are longer on Betfair when the race jumps than the morning market suggested, and the early bookmaker price is the one that looks generous in hindsight. The 13% figure is really a measurement of the drift, not a measurement of how bad the horses are.

The exchange market at jump time is sharp

I will be honest, that is a disappointing figure for me. It shows the intelligence in the market. The exchange is not just running off the bookies' early prices and copying them. By the time the race jumps, a lot of information has gone into that market and it has moved those weak horses out to where they probably belong.

The practical consequence is simple. If you laid all of those lays on Betfair with no input from yourself, no selectivity, no judgement on the day, you would not be winning after commission. The edge that looks huge against a morning fixed price gets eaten by the market's own correction, and then commission takes what is left.

What this means for how you use ratings

This is why I do not treat a low rating as an automatic lay. The bottom end of my ratings is useful, but its value is mostly in telling me what to leave out and in widening the gap against the top end. It is not a standing instruction to lay everything on the exchange and collect.

It also tells you something about where the price you get matters most. Against the early bookmaker market, a weak horse is often badly overbet. Against Betfair at jump time, it usually isn't. Same horse, same opinion, very different result depending on where and when you take it on.

So if you are measuring your own work, measure it against more than one market. If your edge only exists against morning fixed odds and disappears at Betfair starting price, you have learnt something important about what your numbers are actually doing.

Every race on the card, rated, with Kingsley's selections and the speed maps behind them. Your first day is free, no card needed.

More from Kingsley

• Why Fewer Bets May Be the Future of Punting
• Why Unknowns Beat Proven Horses in Staying Races
• Why Horses That Flash Home Get Overbet Early

From the full video: 6 Months of TKZ: The REAL Results Exposed + What's Coming in 2026 🔥

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