Fairness

Two things decide whether you win: which horse your ticket is allocated, and which horse wins the race. We control neither in your favour nor against you — here's exactly how both work.

How horses are allocated

Tickets are allocated in full-field rotation. For each race, the declared field is shuffled into a random sequence; tickets are then dealt from that sequence in order, and when the field is exhausted a fresh shuffled sequence begins. Two guarantees follow:

Identical odds for every ticket. You receive the next horse in a pre-shuffled sequence — no ticket, paid or free, can be favoured.
Identical limits for every route. The 5-entries-per-person-per-race cap counts paid and postal entries together and is enforced the same way on both.
Somebody wins every race. Once a race holds at least as many tickets as runners, every horse in the field is held — whichever wins, real winners are paid.

Provably random shuffles

Each race's shuffle sequence is derived from a secret seed. Before entries open we publish the SHA-256 hash of that seed on the race; when the race goes off, the seed itself is revealed. Anyone can verify that the published hash matches the revealed seed and that the allocation sequence is exactly HMAC-SHA256(seed, race_id) applied as a Fisher–Yates shuffle — proving the sequence existed before any ticket was sold and was never altered.

The Night Draw

At 9.30pm one entry from all of the day's entries — paid and postal, winning and losing alike — is selected to win £250, by the same commit-reveal system: the day's seed hash is published before racing begins, revealed at the draw, and the winning entry is HMAC-SHA256(seed, date) mod entries, verifiable by anyone.

How races are settled

Winning tickets are decided solely by the official result as returned by the racing authorities, including any amendments from stewards' enquiries before the result is made official. We take no position on any race and our income is the same whichever horse wins.

Non-runners, dead heats, abandonments

Non-runner: your choice of a full refund or a fresh horse drawn from the remaining field.
Dead heat: every ticket holding a dead-heating horse is paid the full fixed prize.
Abandoned or void race: all tickets refunded in full.

The maths, plainly. A £5 ticket holds k horses (your choice, 1–5), each winning £2.50 × N ÷ k in an N-runner race, at a k-in-N chance of holding the winner. Expected return is £2.50 at every setting, whatever the field size — a 50p-in-the-pound prize fund on every race and every slider position, published here so you never have to guess.