How does 'odds' work at the bookmakers?

[pumpmt]

I'm trying to understand odds printed in the newspaper. What does it mean 11/4?

If you bet 4 pounds, you’d get a payout of 11 pounds

11/4 means slightly less than 12/4 of which the equivalent would be 3/1.

So that means a slightly better than 3 in 1 chance of winning.

So if I bet on Rishi £11 I'd get £8 back?

If you bet £1 on Rishi you'd get £1.73 back with those odds
If you bet £11 you'd get £19 back

I'm still confused, these responses aren't consistent.

The first number is the amount you would win if you staked the second number.

The less you get back as a ratio to your stake, the higher the odds of that person winning.

So if you staked £11 on Rishi you would win £8 (and get your £11 stake back so would walk away with £19 in total).

So the bigger the gap, if successful, the larger the return on investment ?

if you bet the 2nd number you get the first back if it wins but you also get your stake back.

So 8/11, you bet £11 and you’d win £8 but you’d also get your stake back. So £8+£11 (£19).

You can bet any amount (amusing no restrictions from the bookie) and you’ll get it back at these odds.

I'm confused as well.

How do they set those numbers? And could they not make the second number consistent so it's easy to compare?

It's based on the likely outcome, from a number of factors. Like form for racing etc.

All odds are displayed as whole numbers only. If all odds displayed as a payout for £1 you would end up with odd such as 0.45/1 , 0.04/1 etc, which do not display and read quickly.

The numbers used are the lowest while hungers that represent the probability of the event.

Look at Suella for example.

The bookies are so confident she won’t win that if you stake £1, they’re prepared to pay you £33 (+£1 stake) if she does. Those are long odds. It’s so very unlikely they’ll offer you big odds for the stake money which you won’t get back if you lose. Obviously, if she’d been 100/1 they’d be even more confident she wouldn’t win. But she’s not 10/1, or 3/1.

Now look at Rishi.

Bookie is so confident he will win that if you stake £11, they’ll only give you £8 (+£11) if he does.

Boris - they’ll give you back x3 your stake if he wins. Not as confident as they are about Rishi, way more confident than Suella.

Lowest while numbers, not lowest while hungers.

It’s based firstly on how likely it is to happen and also on what the liability is on it. So for example if you had a 50/1 horse in theory that will happen 1 in 50 times. If it suddenly got backed in (I.e. lots of people backed it) that would shorten the odds.
Different numbers 2nd keep the first number a round number.

You have to look at the odds from the perspective of the bookie. They want to make money. They are fiercely protecting their money. They are using all data and information available to them to make really (what they consider to be) safe but profitable bets with you, the less informed punter, or the punter with a wilder risk appetite.

Whether it’s at the horses, in a casino, on trading floors, it’s all the same. Really really simple bets, backed by mountains of data and information. And, the house always wins.

Thank you for the explanations.

Think I get it now 👍🏻

It might be easier to look at it as a decimal, which you get by dividing the odds. So for Rishi, 8/11: 8 divided by 11 is 0.727. If you bet £1 you would win £1x0.727, 73p plus you would get your £1 stake back. £1.73 as pp said.

On the odds, a win would pay out the frost amount based on a bet of the second amount:

For a £4 bet at 11/4 and you won then they would pay out £11 winnings and your £4 stake - you pay £4 and get £15 back

(there may or may not be tax, it’s a very long time since I went into a bookies, they used to offer the ‘opportunity’ to pay tax on the stake rather than the winnings - if you paid extra for tax up front then you didn’t pay tax if you won)

So, odds like 11/4 mean that for every $4 you bet, you could win $11 in profit if your bet is successful. The first number (11) is how much you win, and the second number (4) is your stake. So, if you bet $4, you’d win $11 plus get your $4 back. I was a bit confused about odds when I first started, but I found non-ukcasinos.com had some helpful resources for beginners when I was learning the ropes. They explained how to read different odds formats, like fractional and decimal, which made it a lot clearer.