FAQ

Here we show some answers to some of the questions we have been asked.

Question

The SPRC received the following complaint through its website:

The SPRC have confirmed that Starting Price will in future be determined using mainly off-course prices. I would therefore expect that the official SPs for each horse race will now be immediately available at the 'off' and in-running.

Consequently, please can you kindly disclose all known websites that provide such timely and accurate data???

I do not require the SPs from a results page - only during a race. Nor do I require the odds offered by each bookmaker before the race, as each horse will have multiple differing prices. I only want the official starting prices once each race has immediately begun.

Although Sportinglife's 'Live Show' do provide the correct starting prices, there is most often a delay, and each race is frequently finished by the time the precise SPs are displayed.

I would very much appreciate any assistance with the above matter.

Our Response

Your understanding of current SP arrangements is correct. However, the process of collating and verifying shows and returning a starting price is essentially the same as the process applied when using on-course prices. The SPs are confirmed by an SP Validator shortly after the ‘off’ of each race now as they always were. The SPs are not confirmed immediately. The SP Validator will first check that there are no obvious technical issues before confirming and submitting them to the system.

The SPRC does not plan to publish these prices in the way that you have requested. We do not believe that there is enough demand for access to mid-race SP confirmations to justify the cost. However, the SPs are supplied to a number of media outlets by PA Sport. Both UK racing TV channels typically display SPs mid-race. Perhaps you could contact those broadcasters, or specialist sites such as Racing Post or Sporting Life to ask whether either or both would be willing to publish those prices on their websites during each race as well as after. To the best of our knowledge, PA does not supply SPs to any customer on the condition that they are only published once a race has concluded.

I apologise that I cannot provide you with a definitive answer, but I would imagine that an earlier feed of SPs is accessible on at least one of PA’s customers’ websites. Alternatively, if you wanted the feed for your own commercial purposes, you could consider contacting PA Sport to request a quote.

Question

The SPRC received the following complaint through its website:

You should be aware that there was a wholesale illegal manipulation of 3 horses; Fire Away, Blazing Dixie & Gallahers Cross. SP punters were ripped off & given massive low prices on these 3 favourites. The "SP"s given were NOT the proper SP's they should have been, presumably overseen by SPRC.

Just because they were potentially caught by prices laid does NOT, AT ALL, allow the Bookmakers to defraud SP backers. What are you going to do about this ?

Our Response

The starting price (SP) is determined by an algorithm publicly available on the homepage of our website. This algorithm has not substantially changed since the SP went over to being based on off-course prices rather than on-course prices, but details of the differences that have been applied are openly set out on this page.

Elsewhere on the website, we explain how the SP is calculated. This says:

For each horse in a race the prices on offer by all bookmakers in the sample are ordered into a list from longest to shortest. The list is then divided into two equal halves and the SP is the shortest odds available in the half containing the longest odds. The SP or a longer price will have been offered by at least half the bookmakers in the sample.

The Starting Price Validation team have retrieved the relevant data and shared it with the SPRC, confirming that more than half of all sampled bookmakers were offering the returned SPs at the point each race started.

The SPRC sees no reason to suppose that established procedures were not adhered to in this case. We are satisfied that the correct SPs were returned. If you have any concerns about the integrity of the races themselves these should be shared with the British Horseracing Authority. If you have evidence of any form of price fixing by bookmakers this should be reported to the Gambling Commission and/or the Competition and Markets Authority.

The SPRC does not pass judgement on what is the appropriate SP for any horse except to check that the starting price accurately records the odds available on each horse in the market at the time of the ‘off’. We are satisfied that the SPs for the races referred to were returned accurately. However, it is our informal observation that the winning SPs and market overrounds for the races you are referring to are not untypical of the winning prices and overrounds of similar, historical races in which certain horses having shown little or no recent worthwhile form have been similarly heavily gambled in the morning markets. We recognise that incidents of this nature involving multiple bet liabilities as substantial as has been reported are relatively rare and we do not believe that these races should be used in isolation as a measure of the effectiveness or fairness of the Starting Price mechanism.

The SPRC is currently gathering data to review the effects of using off-course bookmakers’ prices to determine SPs.