Tote betting is a unique type of betting that’s special to horse racing. Instead of playing against the bookie, your stake is dropped into a communal pot, and you compete against fellow bettors to see who wins. You’ll win dividends depending on how much you staked and how many people bet on the winning wager. At its core, the tote isn’t hard to understand, but it can be overwhelming for new punters, so here is tote betting explained and how you can get involved.
What is Tote Betting?
The Tote itself was established almost a century ago, by Winston Churchill, and was controlled by the government up until 2011. While it’s now privately run by Betfred, it still offers a look into the history of horse race betting as a whole and remains popular among British punters.
At its core, tote betting is a form of lottery bet. You bet on an outcome and win from a shared pot of the collected stakes. How much you win doesn’t depend on odds but rather on how much you choose to stake and how many winners there are to share the prize with. So risky bets are likely to pay out much higher as fewer people will have bet on it. In this way, even very small bets can turn out to pay hand over foot if you happen to win an unlikely wager.
How Does Tote Betting Work?
Tote betting couldn’t be more simple; in many ways, it’s far easier than fixed-odds betting. There are plenty of types of tote bets to place on races, and we’ll go over each type later, but for now, let’s look at the basic way that tote betting works.
First, you want to know which race you want to bet on and find it on the Tote sportsbook - some other sites allow you to make tote bets, but they all come back to this single pool. You can search by race time and then figure out what market you’re betting on.
Now, just pick the bet you want to place and add it to your bet slip. Each bet will have dividends listed above it, and you’ll see an approximated return on your slip once you’ve entered how much you want to wager. This number is based on how many people have made bets and how much is currently in the pool — just remember that this is never guaranteed and can change rapidly up until a race starts.
Types of Tote Bet
From what we explained, it may sound like there’s only one way to place a tote bet, but there are actually many different types of tote bets you can place, each with its own risks and benefits. Let’s take a closer look at the most popular types of bets to place on the tote:
Win/Place
Win and Place bets are the simplest kinds of bets you can place on the tote. A plain Win bet is where you bet on which racer you think will take first place, and if you’re right, you win. The place bet is similar but gives more leeway, where you win if your racer places, not just takes first. Whether a Place bet is available for a race and how many places will count depends on how many racers are competing:
Many people will make a Place and a Win bet at the same time for an each-way bet, and it’s so popular that the tote sportsbook has a shortcut for it when you make a Win bet.
Exacta
If you’re feeling extra confident in your predictions, you could instead opt for an Exacta bet. In this wager, you pick out the racers you think will take first and second. And if you want to cover your bases, you can instead choose a reverse Exacta, which is the same bet placed twice, but one is the reverse of the other.
Since this outcome is much less likely than a regular Place bet, you could win far better dividends with an Exacta. You don’t have to limit yourself to just a reverse either; you can also add more exacta variations to cover all of your bases. Just remember that this is essentially stacking bets up on top of one another to better guarantee yourself a payout — so the stake will go up the more eventualities you account for.
Trifecta
If an Exacta bet just doesn’t feel like enough, you can instead go for a trifecta bet! This is almost identical to an Exacta bet, except that you bet on which racers will come in first, second and third for even bigger potential winnings. And, just like with an Exacta bet, you can make separate bets for all of the permutations of your top three to cover your bases. Another common trifecta is the ‘banker’ trifecta, where you have a racer you bank on being first, with your other two options covered by two bets.
Jackpot and Placepot
The jackpot and placepot totes are probably what the tote is most famous for, thanks to its chances to win huge prizes on very small wagers. They’re very similar to each other but have a couple of key differences.
Each day, a race day is selected for the jackpot, and to win it, you just have to predict the first six winning racers. You’re allowed to add as many potential winners to your betting card as you want, but each one will add more to your stake. On the bright side, with the jackpot’s penny bets, you can make many tiny wagers to increase your odds at a portion of that jackpot, which is always a minimum of £10,000.
What are the Advantages of Tote Betting?
Tote betting obviously offers a unique betting experience, and it has various unique advantages, too. The main one is obviously the pool betting element — by betting through a variable payout, you can luck into huge windfalls for comparatively small wagers depending on how many people have bet and how much money there is to go around. This is true across a wide range of different bet types, whether you opt for the classic tote Exactas or more traditional multiple bets.
Tote betting is also particularly ideal for larger racing events such as Cheltenham or the Grand National. With the jackpot and placepot bets, you routinely bet across many races and keep the entire race lively. And these bets have some of the best logistics on win-to-stake ratios. Even better about the placepot is that your picks don’t even have to win; they can merely place.
