Daily Placepot Tips

A Placepot is a Tote pool bet in which you pick a horse to finish in the places in each of the first six races at a meeting. Get through all six legs and you take a share of the pool. You do not need a single winner.

The Placepot is one of those bets that almost every racing punter knows about, but strangely not that many people really understand properly.

You hear it all the time at the races. "Are you doing the Placepot?"

Someone has a £10 perm on, someone else has somehow got half the field covered in every race, and another bloke is absolutely flying after four legs before his banker finishes last in the fifth.

But where did the Placepot actually come from? How does it work, why can the dividends get so big and, more importantly, is there actually a smart way of playing them?

Where did the Placepot come from?

To understand the Placepot, you first have to go back to the Tote.

The Tote was created in 1928 as the Horserace Totalisator Board, with betting beginning the following year. Unlike a normal bookmaker, where you are betting against the bookmaker at fixed odds, Tote betting works as a pool.

Everyone's stakes go into one big pot, deductions are made, and the remaining money is divided between the winning tickets. That system is known as pari-mutuel betting and it is still the basic idea behind the Placepot today.

The Placepot itself appears to have arrived much later. Woodrow Wyatt became chairman of the Tote in 1976 and, according to a House of Lords discussion from 1980, he came up with the concept after looking at how difficult the Tote Jackpot was.

The Jackpot required punters to find six winners. Which, as anybody who has ever tried to find six winners in one afternoon will tell you, is not exactly straightforward.

The idea behind the Placepot was much simpler. Rather than finding six winners, why not try to find six horses that finish in the places?

And that is basically how the Placepot was born. Nearly 50 years later, the concept has barely changed.

How does a Placepot work?

A standard Placepot covers six races at one meeting, normally the first six races on the card.

Your job is simple. You need at least one of your selections to finish in the qualifying places in every race. Survive all six legs and you get a share of the Placepot pool.

How many places does each race pay?

The number of places depends on the number of runners. This is important, because people sometimes look at a Placepot and assume every race automatically pays three places. It doesn't.

Placepot place terms by field size

Runners	Places paid
4 or fewer	Winner only
5 to 7	First 2
8 or more	First 3
Handicaps with 16 or more	First 4

What is a Placepot perm?

This is where the bet becomes interesting. You don't have to pick just one horse in every race. You can pick multiple horses.

For example:

• Race 1: 2 selections
• Race 2: 1 selection
• Race 3: 3 selections
• Race 4: 2 selections
• Race 5: 1 selection
• Race 6: 2 selections

That creates 24 different combinations: 2 × 1 × 3 × 2 × 1 × 2 = 24. Played at 50p a line, your total bet would cost £12.

That is called a Placepot perm. The problem is that the numbers get out of hand very quickly. Take two horses in every race and you have 64 lines. Take three in every race and you have 729.

What a perm costs at 50p a line

Selections per race	Lines	Cost at 50p
1 in every race	1	£0.50
2 in every race	64	£32.00
3 in every race	729	£364.50
Mixed (2·1·3·2·1·2)	24	£12.00

So just sticking every horse you fancy into the bet is probably not the smartest strategy. This is where bankers become important.

What is a Placepot banker?

A banker is simply a horse you are relying on as your only selection in one of the legs.

If you think a horse has an outstanding chance of finishing in the first three, rather than throwing another two horses into the race, you can banker it. That keeps the number of combinations down and allows you to spread more selections across the races where you think the result is less obvious.

Of course, there is one rather obvious downside. If your banker doesn't place, you are finished. And there are few things more annoying in racing than spending 20 minutes building a lovely Placepot only for your 4/7 banker to get turned over in the first leg.

Why do Placepot dividends get so big?

This is probably the most interesting part of the whole bet. You are not taking fixed odds when you play a Placepot. You are competing against everybody else in the pool.

Say that after deductions there is £100,000 left in the Placepot pool. If there are 1,000 winning £1 units left after the final race, the dividend would be roughly £100. But if there are only 100 winning units left, the same pool could pay roughly £1,000.

That is why one shock result can completely change a Placepot.

Imagine a 4/6 favourite in the third leg. Everybody bankers it. Thousands of tickets are relying on that horse. It finishes fourth. Suddenly a huge percentage of the entire pool is gone. If you managed to oppose it with a horse at 12/1 that sneaked into third, your ticket has suddenly become much more valuable.

The favourite isn't always the best Placepot bet

This is something I think a lot of people get wrong. The obvious horse to place isn't necessarily the best horse to put in your Placepot.

If everybody else has the same horse, there isn't really much value in surviving that leg. You have simply survived alongside the majority of the pool.

The really big dividends tend to come when popular selections get knocked out. So you should sometimes be asking a slightly different question. Not just "which horse is most likely to place?" but "which horse has a good chance of placing that everybody else might have overlooked?"

That is a completely different way of looking at the bet. You are essentially betting against the rest of the pool. It is probably closer to playing a big fantasy sports competition than having a normal bet with a bookmaker. Everyone is trying to solve the same six races, but the winning tickets are the ones that find the right combination.

How I would approach a Placepot

Personally, I wouldn't try to cover everything. If you need four horses in every race to feel comfortable, you probably don't have much of an opinion on the card in the first place.

I would rather identify one or two races where I think there is a strong banker, then use the extra combinations in the really competitive races. Something like this makes much more sense to me:

• Leg 1: Banker
• Leg 2: 2 selections
• Leg 3: 3 selections
• Leg 4: Banker
• Leg 5: 2 selections
• Leg 6: 2 selections

That gives you 24 lines. Enough coverage to give yourself a chance without spending a fortune trying to buy the whole pool.

I would also pay particular attention to vulnerable short-priced favourites. If a favourite is going to appear on a massive percentage of tickets but you think there are genuine reasons it could miss the places, that can completely change the value of your bet.

You won't always get it right. Most of the time the favourite will probably do exactly what everybody expects it to do. But when you get one of those calls right, that is when the Placepot gets interesting.

Why the Placepot still works

The brilliant thing about the Placepot is how simple it is. You don't need six winners. You don't need to be betting hundreds of pounds. And your bet can potentially keep you interested for the entire afternoon.

You can put £10 or £20 into a Placepot and have an interest across six races. Get through the first three legs and suddenly you're checking what you've got left. Get through five and you're desperately looking at the final race wondering why you only put one horse in it.

It has everything racing needs from a betting product. There is strategy. There is a jackpot element. There is the excitement of surviving each race. And because you only need horses to place, casual racing fans can understand it almost immediately.

In many ways the Placepot was gamifying horse racing decades before anybody started using the word gamification.

Placepot betting is about more than finding six placed horses

For me, this is the key thing to remember. Anyone can go through six races and pick the favourite in each one. You might even land the Placepot doing it. But if everybody else has landed exactly the same bet, the dividend probably isn't going to change your life.

The interesting side of Placepot betting is finding the horses the pool has underestimated. Finding the race where the favourite might be vulnerable. Knowing when to banker one and when to take three against it. And building the bet without turning a £10 Placepot into a £150 perm.

That is where the skill comes in.

We will be looking at more Placepot strategies on HorseRacingTips.io, including how to build a perm, how favourites affect the pool and some of the best ways of approaching the big Saturday cards.

Because after nearly 50 years, the Placepot remains one of the simplest bets in racing. But playing it properly is anything but simple.

Common questions

What is a Placepot in horse racing?

A Placepot is a Tote pool bet where you pick a horse to finish in the places in each of the first six races at a meeting. If at least one of your selections places in all six races, you take a share of the pool.

How many places does a Placepot pay?

It depends on the field. Four runners or fewer pays the winner only, five to seven pays the first two, eight or more pays the first three, and a handicap with sixteen or more runners pays the first four.

How much does a Placepot cost?

A single line can be as little as 50p. The cost is the number of combinations multiplied by your stake per line, so two selections in every race is 64 lines, which costs £32 at 50p a line.

What happens if my horse is a non-runner?

Your bet continues. The Tote substitutes the favourite in that leg, so a non-runner does not end your Placepot.

Is a Placepot worth betting?

It gives you an interest across six races for a small stake, and the dividends can be large when a popular favourite is beaten. But the odds of surviving six legs are long: across more than 30,000 races, the favourite finishes in the Placepot places about 63% of the time, which makes six favourites in a row roughly a 1 in 16 shot.

Do you post daily Placepot tips?

Yes. We publish one meeting and one selection per leg every day on this page, and each leg is marked placed or not once the race has been run.

18+ · Please gamble responsibly · BeGambleAware.org