Dead heats are a fascinating part of betting. Unless you bet on golf most people only really see them in horse racing and not that often. In golf though they play a much larger role within each way betting, place betting, round leader markets & 3 balls.
Understanding dead heats is one of the fundamental requirements within the punting game. It involves some of the more basic maths but it can be hugely important. If you have a good understanding of it can help you to get an edge at times.
A dead heat is simply two or more participants tying on the same score, when the number of participants who are tied, is greater than the number of winners in that market. Lets keep it simple with racing where you only have one winner. If two horses finish in a tie for 1st it is a dead heat.
In that example you get paid half your stake. Lets say you had £20 on a horse at 5/1 who ends up in a dead heat. You essentially get £10 @ 5/1 and get your stake back. So you bet would return £60 (£40 profit). That is dead heats at their simplest. With golf it can get much trickier.
Let’s assume the bets are being placed with bookmakers and are each way bets. Lets take an each way market paying 1/4 the top 5. The players finish 1, 2, 3 4, T5th, T5th. You in essence have two players finishing in a dead heat for 5th place. If you had backed one of them for £20 EW you get the following. You would have staked £40 and return £92.50 (profit of £52.50). Lets imagine the leaderboard looked like this 1, 2, T3, T3, T5, T5, T5. We have three players finishing in tied 5th and occupying three places. Using the same bet sizes we would return £61.67 (profit of £21.67).
Let’s take a leaderboard of 1, T2, T2, T4, T4, T4, T4, T4. In this case you have five players tied for 4th place. So we have two places for the 5 players. It would return £74 (profit £34). Lets take the last example but say that the bookmaker was paying on the 1st 6 places instead of 5. We would have returned £111 (profit of £71). There are a huge number of different permutations. As you can see the dead heat returns vary hugely depending upon where your player finished, what place terms you have taken, the number of places offered by the bookie.
I don’t want this thread to be about which place terms and number of places are the best to take. We will save that for a different thread. Dead heats are very similar on the exchanges to with the bookmaker, except you don’t have the win part of the bet and it is in decimal odds.
Dead heat rules and understanding them can become crucial if trading in play markets. Lets say you are betting in running on a first round leader market. Towards the end of that round all sorts of scenarios will occur but given there is a strong likelihood of a dead heat
and it can involve large numbers of players, you must understand the maths behind it if you are trying to calculate prices. Dead heats are also interesting if you are a player in say Top 5 or Top 10 markets. You tend to find they favour the layer.
There are betting calculators out there that can help but you need to gain an intuitive feel for it. The bottom line is that you have to understand basics like dead heats, like the back of your hand.
ProPunting 