Category: FAQ

‘Tote’ is short for Horserace Totalisator Board and refers to a statutory corporation established, as the Racehorse Betting Control Board, in 1928. For much of its existence, the Tote was the only company in Britain allowed to accept pool bets. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the Tote has become a privatised, limited company and has lost its monopoly on pool betting. However, Tote betting essentially remains the same as it always has been.

Tote betting differs from fixed-odds betting with conevntional bookmakers insofar that all the money staked on a particular market – win, place, and so on – is pooled together. A fixed percentage is deducted from the pool and a winning dividend is calculated by dividing the remainder by the number of winning bets, or units. Obviously, this introduces an element of the unknown but, because the dividend reflects the popularity of a horse in the betting market, less well-backed outsiders often pay better on the Tote than they do with conventional bookmakers.

Tote betting is not limited to simple win, place or each-way bets. More complex, exotic bets include the ever-popular Tote Placepot, where punters select horses to finish placed in the first six races at a designated meeting, and the Tote Swinger, where they select two horses to finish anywhere in the first three in a designated race.

As in other walks of life, in horse racing, a ‘syndicate’ refers to a group of people engaged in a shared enterprise, in this case the ownership of one or more racehorses. Obviously, the initial purchase price of a racehorse varies according to its age, pedigree, soundness and so on, but between £10,000 and £20,000 is not uncommon. Coupled with annual training costs, typically between £16,000 and £23,000, it is easy to see how the cost of buying a racehorse and keeping it in training is beyond the means of many individuals.

Consequently, groups of like-minded people, who may be strangers to each other, are brought together by a syndicate manager to share purchase cost(s) and the day-to-day cost of ownership among them. A typical syndicate consists of twenty or so members, each of whom buys a fixed share, say 5%, in one or more horses and makes an annual contribution towards training and other costs. Any prize money is, likewise, shared among syndicate members, but most people join a syndicate for the love of the sport, rather than an opportunity to make money.

Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II has enjoyed a lifelong passion for horse racing. Indeed, between her coronation in 1953 and 2020, when she was forced to stay at home because of Covid-19 restrictions, the Queen never missed a day of Royal Ascot.

Her officially registered racing colours consist of a purple jacket with gold braid, red sleeves and a black velvet cap with a gold fringe, as previously used by her great grandfather King Edward VII and, before that, by the later King George IV during his years as Prince Regent. Racing colours are currently supplied to the Queen by Newmarket-based Gibson Saddlers, which was granted a Royal Warrant of Appointment by Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother in 1932.

All told, the Queen has seen the famous Royal silks carried to victory at Royal Ascot on 24 separate occasions. The first was in 1953, when Choir Boy won the Royal Hunt Cup, but arguably the most memorable came in 2013, when Estimate won the historic Gold Cup. John Warren, Bloodstock and Racing Advisor to the Queen, later wrote, ‘No reigning monarch had won the Gold Cup and it gave Her Majesty great pleasure in achieving an ambition to breed such a great horse of true stamina and grit.’

‘Dutch betting’, or ‘Dutching’ for short, is a betting technique that involves backing multiple selections in the same race. Legend has it the idea was developed by infamous New York gangster Arthur Flegenheimer, a.k.a. ‘Dutch Schultz’, hence the name. In any case, the aim of dutching is make the same profit regardless of which selection wins, assuming that one does. Of course, it’s possible that all selections lose, in which case all stakes are lost.

Fairly obviously, if the odds on each selection are the same, say, 2/1 twice, the stake is split equally between them. If not, say, one selection at 1/1 and another at 3/1, the stake is split proportionally, with the shorter-priced selection carrying three-quarters of the total amount and the longer-priced selection just one-quarter. Backing two horses in a race increases the chances of winning, but splitting the stake between the selections produces ‘coupled’ odds, which are greatly reduced. In the above example, if we stake one point each on our two 2/1 selections and one of them wins the total return is three points. In other words, we’ve staked two points to win three, at collective odds of 1/2.