Most betting you do is against a bookmaker at a fixed price. Tote betting is different: it is pool betting, where you bet against other punters and share a common pot. It runs some of the most popular bets in racing, above all the Placepot. Here is how it works.
How pool betting works
With the Tote, every stake on a given bet type goes into one pool. After the race:
- The Tote takes a deduction from the pool.
- What remains is divided among the winning tickets.
- The result is declared as a dividend to a £1 stake.
So a Win Tote dividend of £6.20 means a winning £1 ticket returns £6.20. The crucial difference from a bookmaker is that you do not know the final price in advance, it depends on how much money is in the pool and how many people share it. Back an unfancied winner that few others were on and the dividend can be far bigger than the bookmaker's odds.
The main Tote pools
- Win: pick the winner; share the win pool.
- Place: pick a horse to finish in the places; share the smaller place pool.
- Each-Way: a win and a place ticket combined.
- Exacta: the first two in the correct order (the Tote's forecast).
- Trifecta: the first three in the correct order (the Tote's tricast).
- Swinger: two horses to both finish in the top three, in any order.
The Placepot, the people's bet
The Placepot is the Tote's flagship. The aim is simple:
Pick a horse to be placed in each of the first six races at a single meeting.
You can pick more than one horse per race to improve your chances (each extra selection multiplies the cost). If at least one of your horses places in every one of the six races, your ticket survives to the end and shares the pool.
Why punters love it:
- A small stake can return a big dividend, especially when favourites get beaten.
- You only need horses to place, not win.
- It keeps you interested all afternoon, across six races.
If a leg has a non-runner, your stake for that leg usually switches to the SP favourite, so the ticket stays alive.
The Quadpot and other multi-race pools
- Quadpot: the same idea over races 3, 4, 5 and 6, a cheaper, later-starting alternative to the Placepot.
- Scoop6: a large win-and-place pool over six televised races on Saturdays, famous for its rolling jackpots and occasional life-changing payouts.
- Jackpot / Placepot variants run at most meetings.
A worked Placepot example
You build a £1 Placepot and, to give yourself cover, you pick 2 horses in two of the races and 1 horse in the other four. The number of lines is 2 × 2 × 1 × 1 × 1 × 1 = 4 lines, so the bet costs £4.
A horse of yours places in all six races, so your ticket gets through. The Placepot dividend is declared at £42.30 to a £1 stake. You had four lines, but only the line(s) that came through pay, here one winning line returns £42.30, comfortably clearing the £4 outlay. A losing leg at any point, and the whole ticket is gone.
Tote vs the bookmaker
- Upside: pool dividends can be much bigger than fixed odds, particularly on outsiders and on multi-race bets like the Placepot.
- Downside: you bet blind to the final price, and on a short-priced favourite the Tote can pay less than a bookmaker would.
The Tote is at its best for the Placepot, Quadpot and big pools where the shared-pot model and small stakes create genuinely large potential returns. For backing a single horse at a known price, a fixed-odds bookmaker is usually the better tool.
See also each-way betting and forecasts and tricasts for the fixed-odds equivalents.
Betting should be fun, never a way to make money. 18+. Please gamble responsibly, BeGambleAware.org.