Placepot Explained

A Placepot, often referred to as a Tote Placepot, is a popular kind of tote bet that provides an opportunity to win a significant sum of money for a relatively small outlay. If you are unfamiliar with Tote betting, it is a pool betting system in which a major proportion of the total money staked on the tote is shared out amongst the winners. Once government run, the Tote is now run by Betfred.  Here we will look in detail at a Placepot bet along with an easy to follow example.

The Placepot is just one of the Tote bests that are available. The bet covers the firs 6 races on the race card of the day and is available at every UK race meeting, which all have a minimum of six races. There are some exceptions, for instance if the meeting opens with a speciality race and there are seven or eight races in the day, the Placepot may cover races 2 to 7, ignoring the speciality race.

To bet on the placepot you must select at least one horse for each of the six races. You can select as many horses as you wish, but the more horses you select the more expensive your stake becomes, so let’s deal with this point first. First you select your basic stake which typically varies from 10p up to £20. For the sake of simplicity, in this example we will select £1.

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That is the amount you stake on each combination. If you select just one horse in each race then there is only one possible combination that will give you a win and your total stake is just £1 x 1 = £1. If you make  two selections per race, the total number of combinations will be 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x2 = 64, (in other words 2⁶) so your total stake will be £64. if you chose to make 4 selections a race, then there will be 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 (or 4⁶) = 4,096 combinations meaning an eye-wateringly high outlay of £4,096.  Even with a 10p stake your total bet would be almost £410.

In reality you might select just one horse for certain races and multiple horses for others, so Let’s look at a typical Placepot betting slip.

Walking through this: on the first race we have selected horses 7 and 11; on the second horses 4 and 22; on the third whatever horse turns out to be the favourite; on the fourth horses 8 and 9; on the fifth the favourite; and on the last race the favourite and horses 4 and 6.

Let’s assume that we have selected a stake of £1. The actual stake will thus be £1 multiplied by the number of combinations which is £(2 x 2 x 1 x 2 x 1 x 3) = £24.

To win, you must have a selection that is placed in each race. If you fail to achieve this in any race, then your bet has lost. As you can see, the excitement of the bet increases as each race progresses as long as you can stay in. This is why we have made three selections for the last race; we don’t want to get that far and lose at the very end.

Assuming we have won, what will be our winnings?

That depends on the number of successful combinations along with the size of the declared dividend. Consider the following results.

Here the number of winning combinations are 1 x 1 x 1 x 2 x1 x 2 = 4, so 4 combinations at a stake of £1 is £4.

Assuming that that the Tote declares a dividend of £35, then your total winnings are £35 x 4 = £140. It is possible for the dividend to be much higher than that, in fact anything from £10 to £200 is typical.

To finish: if your bet ends up a non-runner, the favourite will replace it as your bet. If a race has joint favourites at the off, then for the purposes of the Placepot, the favourite will be presumed to be the runner with the lower race number. In circumstances that favourite is withdrawn from the race then the next horse in the betting will take its place.

The Placepot is a great type of bet; fun, exciting and potentially lucrative so why not try it out?

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