Dead heats and Rule 4

You can strike 4/1, watch the horse win, and still not be paid 4/1 on the whole stake. Two old Tattersalls rules do that. A dead heat saws the stake in half. A Rule 4 takes pence off the winnings because another horse never ran. The price on the slip does not change. The arithmetic underneath it does. The settler is not rewriting the race. They are applying a table older than the app.

Dead heat: the stake gets sawn

Two noses on the line. The book does not pay both of you as if you had the race to yourselves. It divides the stake by how many dead-heated, then pays the original odds on that slice. The rest of the stake is lost. That is the whole rule. There is no poetry in it, which is why it still works.

£10 at 4/1, two-way dead heat: settled as £5 at 4/1. Returns £25, not £50. Three-way at 6/4 on £10: stake becomes £3.33, times 2.50, returns £8.33 — the number Sky Bet print in their own help. Three-way at 20/1 on £20: 20 ÷ 3 × 21 = £140.

Place bets and golf top-10s use the same fraction with a second number. Four players tying for two remaining spots: half the stake is paid. A win bet is just “places filling = 1”. If you set places filling higher than the field that tied, you have described a walkover and the sheet pays in full. That is not a bonus. It is you telling the sheet there was no tie to split.

Rule 4: pence off the winnings

A horse is withdrawn after the market is formed. There is no time to put up a new board. Tattersalls Rule 4 takes a published number of pence in the pound — of winnings, never of stake — according to the price of the horse that did not run. People still argue this in the queue as if the shop made it up this morning. It did not.

A 4/1 non-runner is 20p in the £. £10 at 5/2 would have won £25. Keep 80p of that £25 = £20. The £10 stake still comes back. Total £30, not £35. A 16/1 or bigger withdrawal takes nothing; the horse was long enough that the board barely noticed. Two evens non-runners are 45p + 45p. They add. They stop at 90p, which is the exchange’s way of admitting there is a floor.

The table on the calculator is the industry one: 1/9 or shorter is 90p, down through evens at 45p, to 10/1–14/1 at 5p. Some shops waive the 5p band because five pence is more trouble than it is worth. Ante-post is often a different rule. Read the coupon before you tell a settler they have robbed you. This desk will do the sum. It will not do the shouting.

Dead heat and Rule 4 calculator