Talking Horses: punters right to ask why the Tote is still playing its own game

If you place a bet on the Tote, who do you think you are betting against? For most of its customers, the answer today would probably be much the same as it was when Winston Churchill helped to set up the UK’s pool-betting operation nearly a century ago. The Tote is there for recreational, relatively small-scale punters, and racegoers in particular, who want a fiver each-way for an interest, or a few quid in the Placepot in the hope of a decent return at the end of the afternoon.

And while hardly anyone on a day out at the races is bothered about the mechanics of Tote betting, one key point is generally understood: there’s no bookie. Instead, all the cash goes into the pool, the Tote takes a cut off the top and then divides what is left by the number of winning units to get the dividend.

Since May 2020, however, there has been a new player in the pools: the Tote itself. Faced with the problem of maintaining liquidity in a post-lockdown world with no racegoers, the Tote came up with a Pool Guarantee Service (PGS) which, according to its website, “seeds wagers into the pools … in order to provide robust pools into which all customers of the UK Tote can bet. By increasing the size of the overall pools, PGS helps to stabilise pricing within the pools so that the published ‘will-pay’ figures [the on-screen estimated dividends] reflect as closely as possible the final UK Tote dividend that is declared after the result.”

The Tote accepted at the outset that situations might arise in which it would effectively “win” money from its customers, while also saying that its ideal scenario would be “to come out neutral in the long term”. Imagine, for instance, that a once-a-year punter finds an outrageous Tricast because three rank