If a bookmaker were able to design the perfect race to maximise their profits, then the Grand National would not be far short of what they would create: a handicap steeplechase with 30 fences, 40 runners, over more than four miles. It is no surprise that it was bookmaker Ladbrokes which effectively rescued the Grand National in the 1970s when Aintree racecourse was sold and threatened with closure. The bookmakers probably saw their big annual pay day disappearing with it.
From a bookmaker’s perspective about the only way the Grand National could be improved to fill their coffers even more was if they were able to change the height of the fences or the width of the water jump at the last second just as the horses approached (as perfected by James Bond’s enemy Max Zorin in A View To A Kill).
The bookmakers’ biggest worry is having enough cashiers behind the betting shop counter, enough agents in the call centre to answer the phone, and that their website can hold up to the extra traffic (a test which Coral’s new website failed in the aftermath of its Sprinter Sacre offer at the Cheltenham Festival last month).
For a gambler who takes their betting even moderately seriously the Grand National should really be a non-betting event, however difficult it is to resist getting sucked in. The overround the bookmakers work to is obscenely high. It is one of the few betting markets where every horse can seemingly shorten in price just before the race without any other runner’s price being pushed out to counteract it (thus increasing the overround further still). At the time of writing, with 48 runners still entered the theoretical percentage on the book is 33%.
In addition, however good your form study, the amount of luck needed in running to get round is a lot higher than for an ‘ordinary’ horse race.
The current favourite for the race is Willie Mullins’ On His Own, which fell in the Grand National last year. The gelding has only run once since that day, winning the Boyne Hurdle at Navan in February. But a price of 7/1 is surely too short in a 40 runner handicap, no matter how good the horse or how talented the trainer.
Even if every other runner in the race were a three-legged shire horse I would still think twice about taking 7/1 in a 4 mile+ steeplechase with 30 fences.
