It comes down to how easily they can manage their risk. Lets say they are giving you tote prices. They can easily put your money on the tote to balance their books. Also at tote pries they basically have a 15%+ built into the book as that is what is taken by the tote.

Here is an example of a 3 horse race.

Horse A has $100 bet on it
Horse B has $1000 bet on it.
Horse C has $10000 bet on it.

This would be a very unbalanced book (depending on prices but lets assume they are all finish at odds of around $2.6). If they were to hold this money on each selection then if horse C won they would lose. So what they do is lay off their risk on horse C and horse B to the tote. Their book now looks like this.

Horse A has $100 bet on it (and $0 at tote)
Horse B has $100 bet on it (and $900 which they bet into the tote and just pas through)
Horse C has $100 bet on it (and $9900 which they bet into the tote and just pass through).

Now they really are risking $100 per horse and no matter who wins they get $300 and pay out $260 to the winning horse giving them a $40 profit.

Now lets say Horse C wins. They make their $40 and the $9900 they put into the tote they win and they pay out the bettors who bet with them.

Of course its much more complicated balancing a book then that but it gives you an idea.


Fixed Price they are trying to balance the book themselves with other markets such as betfair and other bookies. They are taking a set price so they need to make sure they are not putting up too high a price. They can't lay this off to the tote as too large sums of money on the tote will move the tote price lower and below their fixed price.