Looking at “Bet with Ascot”-Steve Tilley
If you visit Ascot racecourse, amongst the escalators, beautiful flowers, and bowler-hatted stewards, you will find numerous booths and counters under the banner of “Bet with Ascot”. However, most bettors, particularly those who haven’t visited Ascot, have little idea about how these booths work.
In discussions on X, formerly Twitter, it became clear that there was considerable confusion surrounding “Bet with Ascot”, the most basic being its name. It was frequently referred to as AscotBet; however, this unfortunately risks confusing it with ChesterBet and BangorBet, which are own-brand betting outlets run by Chester and Bangor.
There was remarkably little online, either published by Ascot themselves or by anyone else, about “Bet with Ascot”. So, wearing my Horse Racing Bettors’ forum hat, I reached out to Ascot to try to find out what was going on.
Ascot kindly invited me to a meeting where I met Will Aitkenhead, who took me through what “Bet with Ascot” was.
“Bet With Ascot” is fundamentally simple; it is a Tote pool bet where all bets are fed into the Tote pool, or, for certain races, the World Pool, and dividends are paid out to match theirs. However, there are differences.
The UK Tote offers an SP guarantee, so if the Tote win payout is less than the Industrial Starting Price, the Tote makes up the difference. So, if the Tote dividend was 4.50 and the winning SP was 4/1, the Tote would pay out 5.00, matching the SP. This does not happen with “Bet with Ascot”; in the previous example, they would pay out £ 4.50, not £ 5.00.
“Bet with Ascot” promotes lucky dip bets where bettors get a randomly chosen set of bets for either the whole meeting or a given race. These are priced at £20 for a meeting or £10 for an individual race. These are relatively popular with on-course bettors, and as they include forecasts and placepots, can yield a large win for a lucky bettor.
Along with all the regular Tote bets, there is also a treble that takes in the last three races of the day, where you must select the three winners.
“Bet with Ascot” also provides easy-to-understand tips and information about the horses running in each race.
“Bet with Ascot” also features automatic ticket vending machines, allowing you to type in your bet and pay by card.
The question people will be asking is, if this is just a Tote bet, why bother with branding it as “Bet with Ascot”? The answer is that Ascot regards “Bet with Ascot” not just as an income stream but as a way of improving the racecourse experience of its visitors.
I was lucky enough to meet Chris Collard, who is the director of betting at Ascot.
He made one statement that I don’t think I’ve ever heard from anyone involved with betting. “The most important thing to me is the enjoyment of the racegoers, if to achieve that we have to take less from the racegoers, I am happy with that”.
I did take him to task about the absence of information about “Bet with Ascot” online. He felt that providing lots of extra information wouldn’t benefit most of his racegoers, and that was his priority. I was not overly happy with that, and hopefully, in the future, Ascot will have a link to more information about “Bet with Ascot” on their website.
This brings forward one of the issues affecting betting in the UK. Do you have an easy-to-use product aimed at the casual bettor, or do you have a better value but more complex product for people to bet on? My personal view is that there is room for both, and as long as bettors are well-informed about the various mediums, they should be allowed to choose whichever they prefer.
At Ascot, there is no difficulty in getting a better value bet if you wish. You can bet with the on-course bookmakers, or you can even bet online with your bookmaker. Ascot’s Wifi does not block specific betting sites, unlike the Jockey Club courses.
So, this started as a bit of a mystery about what “Bet with Ascot” was, and unlike most mysteries in horse racing, there wasn’t something dubious at the bottom of it.
“Bet with Ascot” is a straightforward product designed for casual racegoers at Ascot. Simple as that.