What is Best Odds Guaranteed (BOG)?
Best Odds Guaranteed — Best Odds Guaranteed is a horse-racing promotion that pays out winning bets at the higher of the price you took or the SP (starting price).
Best Odds Guaranteed (BOG) is a horse-racing promotion offered by most major UK bookmakers: if the SP (starting price) of a horse is higher than the price you took when you placed the bet, the bookmaker pays out at the higher price. Take 4.0 on a horse in the morning, the horse drifts to 6.0 by the off and wins — a BOG-eligible operator settles at 6.0, not at the 4.0 you struck. BOG covers win-only single bets on UK and Irish racing in almost every implementation.
BOG is one of the very few bookmaker-side promotions that's reliably positive-expected-value without needing a lay bet at all. Taking morning prices on UK racing is effectively free upside while BOG is active: if the price drifts you collect more, if the price shortens you collect at the price you took. The matched-betting playbook for BOG is therefore the inverse of the usual structure — "back, don't lay" — which is a sharp departure from the back-and-lay pattern that dominates every other promotion type. Across many BOG plays, drifters and shorteners roughly cancel each other out, but the asymmetric payout gives a measurable edge of 1–3% on every BOG-eligible bet, before any other promo stacks on top.
Most UK operators run BOG year-round on UK and Irish horse racing — William Hill, Sky Bet, Paddy Power, Coral, Ladbrokes, Betfred, BoyleSports, BetVictor and Bet365 are all BOG-active in the current window. Some extend the promotion to greyhounds; a few reduce it to specific meetings during peak weeks. The full BOG workflow including market-eligibility and odds-tracking is in our BOG guide; the broader racing primer is in our horse racing basics guide; the per-operator BOG status sits on each bookmaker hub.
Worked example
9am Saturday morning. Back £10 to win at 4.0 on a 14:00 handicap at William Hill (BOG-eligible). Don't lay it off — for BOG plays, leaving the back uncovered is the strategy. The bookmaker is on the hook for the better of the two prices, and the matched bettor's only job is to take the morning price as early as the market allows.
The horse drifts. By the 14:00 off, the SP returns at 6.0 and the horse wins. William Hill pays out at the BOG price: £10 × 6.0 = £60, not the £40 the original 4.0 price would have settled. The £20 BOG uplift is the entire edge of the play, and it materialises only because the bookmaker's promotion guarantees the higher of the two prices. Stake the same £10 across many BOG-eligible races and the structural edge accumulates — typically £3–£8 per dozen plays at sensible odds bands.
Common mistake
Laying off a BOG bet at the exchange. The entire point of BOG is that the bookmaker pays at the better of two prices — laying converts a positive-EV BOG play into a near-zero-EV back-and-lay structure, with the BOG uplift cancelled by the exchange's symmetric pricing. The other beginner trap is taking BOG on horses already trading at SP (i.e., placing the bet at the off rather than in the morning) — there's no SP-vs-taken-price spread left to capture, so BOG adds nothing. BOG is a morning-price strategy: the earlier you take the price relative to the off, the more often the uplift triggers.