Racing guide · 8 September 2026 · 3 min read

SP vs BSP, and why it decides an honest record

Starting price, or SP, is the price returned by the on-course bookmakers at the moment a race goes off. It's compiled by the Press Association from a snapshot of prices across the ring and has been the standard settlement price for high street and online bookmakers for decades. Betfair starting price, or BSP, is a different animal entirely. It's the price generated by Betfair's own in-play auction at the off, matching every available back and lay bet into a single figure.

The two numbers usually sit close together but they are not the same market, and treating them as interchangeable is where a lot of published racing records fall apart. If a service quotes results at SP but most of its readers actually bet on an exchange, or the other way round, the record they're showing you isn't the record you'd have got. That gap matters more than it sounds.

Why the two prices drift apart

SP reflects bookmaker liability. Traders shorten or lengthen a horse based on where the weight of money is landing across their own books, and different firms can hold slightly different views right up to the off. BSP reflects something closer to pure supply and demand. It's set by whoever is actually willing to back or lay at that instant, with no bookmaker taking a position against the punter.

In practice this means BSP tends to run a shade bigger on horses that get backed hard late, because exchange users chasing a price push it out rather than in. Short-priced favourites can go the other way, settling tighter on the exchange than the SP suggests. Neither price is wrong. They're measuring two different marketplaces at the same moment, and a horse can return a noticeably different result depending on which one you use.

What commission does to BSP returns

Exchange betting isn't free at the point of settlement. Betfair takes a commission on winning bets, charged as a percentage of the return, and that percentage varies depending on your account status and how much you've bet through the exchange over time. A result that looks solid at the raw BSP figure gets trimmed once commission comes off it, and the size of that trim is different for every user.

This is why any record built on BSP needs to be upfront about whether commission has been applied, and at what rate. Quoting the raw exchange price without touching on commission flatters the figure. Quoting it after a standard commission deduction gives a more honest sense of what a real account, paying real charges, would actually see land.

Why the settlement price changes the record

Here's the practical problem. A set of selections settled at SP and the same set settled at BSP can produce genuinely different outcomes over a run of results, sometimes by a meaningful margin. Neither figure is dishonest on its own. The dishonesty creeps in when a record is built on a price nobody following it could actually have obtained by the time they placed a bet.

Early prices are the worst offender here. A horse might be available at 8/1 first thing in the morning and go off at 5/1, and a record settled at that early 8/1 bears no relation to what anyone reading it that morning could still get by race time. SP and BSP are both taken at the same moment the race actually starts, which is why they're the two prices worth trusting when you're checking whether a record stands up.

How The Racing Bot settles its record

The Racing Bot settles its published record at Betfair starting price, with standard commission accounted for rather than ignored. That's a deliberate choice. BSP is a price a real exchange account could have matched at the off, not a price plucked from an early show that had moved on by the time anyone could act on it.

Whichever service you're reading, the question worth asking before you trust any set of results is simple: which price is this settled on, and could you have actually got it? If the answer is vague, or the price quoted is one that vanished from the market hours before the race, treat the figures with some caution. If it's SP or BSP taken at the off, you're at least looking at something real.