What is a longshot bet?
A longshot is a selection offered at high odds because the market gives it only a small chance of winning, so a successful bet pays many times the amount staked.
Every underdog is less likely to win than the favourite. A longshot is an underdog at the far end of that scale: the 25/1 horse, the newly promoted club to win the league, the qualifier to win a Grand Slam.
“Longshot” is the American word that has travelled everywhere. British racing also says outsider or “rank outsider”, and you’ll hear “rag” at the track. There’s no official cut-off. Most people start using the word somewhere around 10.00 (9/1, +900) and up.
Example
A horse is priced at 26.00 (25/1, or +2500).
- Implied chance: 1 ÷ 26.00 = 3.8%
- A $5 stake returns $130, a $125 profit.
Put another way: if the price were perfectly fair, you’d expect this horse to win about once in 26 races. Back 26 of them at $5 each and you’d spend $130 to get $130 back. And prices are never perfectly fair.
Watch out
There’s a well-documented pattern called the favourite–longshot bias. Across racing and other sports, researchers have repeatedly found that bets on longshots lose a bigger share of the money staked than bets on favourites do. Two reasons:
- Bettors love a small stake with a huge payout, so they overbet big prices.
- Bookies load more of their margin onto the outsiders, where it’s harder to notice. The gap between 26.00 and a “fair” 34.00 doesn’t look like much. It’s enormous.
None of that means you should never back one. It means a big price needs a real reason, not a feeling. And expect long losing runs: at a 4% strike rate, fifty losers in a row isn’t unusual, so keep stakes tiny.
If you want some cover, an each-way bet pays a fraction of the odds for a place finish.