How the Shortlist works

How a horse gets on the list

Backing favourites isn't the hard part. Anyone can find the horse at the top of the betting. The hard part is knowing which of them to leave alone, because a lot of them are short for the wrong reasons.

A finishing position only tells you so much. A horse might have travelled well and faded late. It might have been slowly away, or never found a gap. You can always find an excuse for the last run.

An excuse explains the last race. What I want to know is what's changed for this one.

Maybe it's dropping back in trip after fading. Maybe it meets a weaker field than last time. If something has genuinely changed, it can go on the list. If all I've got is an excuse, it doesn't.

Then the price has to be right. A horse can be the likeliest winner in the race and still be too short to bother with, because everyone else has spotted the same thing.

What's left is the shortlist. Most of it is win bets on horses near the top of the market, often with a place bet alongside. On the win bets the usual Betfair price has been around 3.1. On the place bets it's been around 1.39, which is why so many of them land.

I check the mix of rules every three months against the results so far, and only ever against results that have already happened.

Three kinds of bet

Most of what you get is the main shortlist. That's the core of it, and it has made money in every year on record.

On busier weeks there are a few extra picks from a second set of rules. They only go on when they add something the main list doesn't already have.

The third kind is the comeback bet. It's a jumps horse that failed to finish last time, is back within 60 days, and whose form says the fall or the pull up was a one off. These go on at half stakes, because they're the newest part of the system and the results for them have been up and down from year to year.

There's a daily limit on how much goes on, so a busy card never turns into a big day of staking.

Putting the bets on

Everything goes on at the Betfair Exchange, at starting price. You only need the one account.

1. Open the race on the Betfair Exchange. Use the "Win" market for win bets and the "To Be Placed" market for place bets.
2. Click the horse's back price and put in your stake.
3. Tick "Take SP" on the bet slip. That way you get the starting price, the same as the results on this site, and you can put the bets on in the morning and forget about them.
4. Check your results that evening in your members' log in.

How much to stake

The results are in points. Most win bets are 1 point. Comeback bets are half a point, and place bets are a quarter or half a point. Each tip says the stake. If a point is £10 to you, a 1 point win bet is £10 and a quarter point place bet is £2.50.

The worst run from a high point to a low one in the record was 26.8 points, back in 2024. Since then the worst has been 15.0. I'd keep a betting bank of at least 40 points so a bad spell never worries you. Only ever use money you can afford to lose.