Tissue Prices and Forecast Odds in UK Horse Racing: Reading the Early Market
Table of Contents
- The number that gets printed before the market exists
- Who compiles a tissue
- The Racing Post show panel and the media display
- The drift from tissue to opening show — where the signal sits
- Tissue prices, overround, and what they are really telling you
- Using a tissue to find value against the opening market
- Tissues and ante-post free bets
- Reader questions on early-market forecasting
The number that gets printed before the market exists
The column in the morning racing press labelled “Forecast Odds” or, in some trade publications, simply “Tissue” is the single most misunderstood number in UK racing. Punters glance at it, read “6/1” next to a horse, and assume that is where the horse opens trading. It is not. The tissue is a compiler’s estimate of where the market should open, published hours before a single stake has changed hands. It is a forecast, not a quote. And on a typical meeting about a third of the runners will open trading more than 20 per cent away from their tissue price.
I spent the first two years of my career treating tissues as binding. That was a mistake. The tissue is a view — an informed, experienced view in the case of the national papers, but a view nonetheless — and the market forms in the hours after publication as stake flow hits the exchanges and early-bird bookmaker prices. Understanding the gap between the tissue and the opening show is where some of the better value in midweek UK racing lives, because the compilers are not always right and the market catches them out on a reliable subset of races.
This piece covers who actually compiles tissues, how the number appears in the racing press and on the Racing Post’s show panel, the drift from tissue to opening show, and how to use the discrepancy as a value signal. I also address the question every punter eventually asks — can I use a free bet on a tissue-priced runner ante-post?
Who compiles a tissue
Tissue prices in the UK are produced by a small number of specialist compilers working for racing media and data providers. The Racing Post’s forecast prices are produced by their in-house compilation team, working from form data, going reports, weight allowances, and compiler intuition accumulated across years of individual meetings. The Press Association’s tissues feed into the wire services that supply most national newspapers’ racing pages. A few specialist race-specific tissues — for the big handicaps, Grand National, Cheltenham festival races — are produced by named compilers whose work is cited with attribution in the racing press.
The methodology is not statistical. A tissue compiler does not run a regression on previous form figures and output a price. They examine each runner’s recent form, consider the track and distance preferences, factor in the draw (for flat handicaps), check the jockey-trainer combination, and then produce a price they feel a typical bookmaker market would settle on once trading opens. It is applied judgement, and two experienced compilers looking at the same eight-runner handicap will rarely produce identical tissues.
What they share is discipline. The sum of the implied probabilities across all runners in a tissue should add up to roughly 115 to 125 per cent — matching the overround UK fixed-odds bookmakers typically run. Tissues without an applied overround would be statistically pure but useless as market forecasts, because the actual market always prices in operator margin. Compilers bake that margin in, which means a tissue is a forecast of the market rather than a forecast of fair probability.
The Racing Post show panel and the media display
The Racing Post’s race page is where most UK punters encounter tissue and forecast odds in practice. The “Forecast” column shows the compiler’s pre-market estimate. The “Show” column — populated only when trading has opened — shows live bookmaker-derived prices from the show feed, updated throughout the morning. Comparing the two columns directly shows how the market has moved against the compiler’s forecast.
On a typical midweek Wolverhampton all-weather card, the forecast-to-show drift tends to be modest — 10 to 15 per cent variance across most runners, with the occasional outlier. On a festival card like Cheltenham, where betting volume is concentrated and stake flow is asymmetric, drifts of 30 to 50 per cent are routine, and the forecast becomes a rapidly ageing artefact by mid-morning on race day. The tissue is most useful as a baseline to measure market movement against, not as a standalone price signal.
The show panel itself updates as on-course and off-course prices aggregate into the feed. The “opening show” — the first price published after official trading opens — is the closest thing to a clean market price uncontaminated by late stake flow, and it is the number I reference when assessing whether a tissue was “right” or “wrong” for a given race.
The drift from tissue to opening show — where the signal sits
Tissue drift is the interesting bit. A runner that the compiler tissued at 5.0 but which opens at 7.0 in the show is telling you something specific. The market has consensus-priced the runner worse than the compiler did. Possible reasons: the trainer’s recent form has been weaker than the compiler accounted for, the draw is worse than the tissue gave credit for, a stable rumour has filtered into the market overnight, or the compiler simply had a wrong view on the relative merits of the runners.
The inverse drift — a runner tissued at 7.0 opening at 5.0 — means the market sees something positive the compiler did not. Money has already moved onto the runner before you checked the show. This is often a sign of insider confidence, though “insider” here is a weaker word than it sounds — it usually means a small number of informed punters acting on stable-gallop reports or weight allowances the general market has not digested. The shortening-from-tissue runner is frequently a better bet than the drifting-from-tissue runner, but this is not a universal rule.
The systematic value question is whether tissue-to-show drift carries signal you can monetise. My own tracking suggests modestly yes, particularly on handicaps. Runners that drift significantly from a tissue tend to drift further in the market through the day, and runners that shorten continue shortening. The momentum persists until about thirty minutes before the off, at which point late money introduces noise. For pure value-hunting, the tissue-to-show gap at 9am is a more useful signal than the show-to-SP gap at 2pm.
Tissue prices, overround, and what they are really telling you
The overround question is the one punters most often get wrong. A tissue is not a fair-probability forecast. The Horseracingbookmakers analysis quantifies UK racing overround at 110 to 130 per cent on typical fixed-odds markets, rising to 180 per cent on ante-post markets for Grand National and similar large-field events. A compiler producing a tissue bakes that overround in, which means the tissue prices implied-probabilities sum to more than 100 per cent. Betfair Exchange overrounds, by contrast, typically sit at 102 to 105 per cent plus commission — meaningfully tighter than the fixed-odds tissue.
The practical consequence. A tissue of 8.0 does not mean the compiler thinks the runner has a 12.5 per cent chance. It means the compiler thinks the runner will open in the market at 8.0, which implies a fair-probability view of roughly 14 to 16 per cent once the overround is stripped out. Comparing a tissue of 8.0 to a Betfair Exchange back price of 9.0 shows the two are in rough agreement, because the exchange price is simply the same fair-probability estimate expressed with a tighter overround.
This is why I use exchange prices to sanity-check tissues rather than comparing tissue to tissue. The exchange market, when it has meaningful liquidity, is a cleaner expression of crowd-sourced fair probability than a bookmaker-overround-adjusted tissue.
Using a tissue to find value against the opening market
The value-hunt workflow I run on mornings with time to spare: pull the Racing Post’s forecast odds for the meetings I am interested in, check the opening show prices as they populate from about 9am, and flag runners where the opening show is 20 per cent or more longer than the tissue. Those are the candidates for a more detailed second look.
The second look is not automatic. A runner can drift off a tissue for a perfectly good reason — a withdrawn entry elsewhere changing the handicap shape, a morning jockey change, ground conditions differing from the tissue compiler’s assumption. The drift is a flag, not a conclusion. What I am looking for is a drift that I cannot explain from publicly-available morning information. If there is no visible reason for the runner to have drifted 25 per cent off tissue, and the runner’s underlying form profile looks consistent with the tissue’s view, the drift is a candidate value signal.
The hit rate on this workflow is modest — maybe one qualifying value bet every two or three meetings — but when the market is wrong about a runner and the compiler was right, the value can be substantial. I have caught 10.0-to-14.0 drifts where the runner won at 12.0, and the position was purely a function of trusting the compiler’s judgement over the early market noise.
Tissues and ante-post free bets
The tissue-to-ante-post market question. Ante-post prices for future meetings — Cheltenham festival races published weeks or months in advance — are themselves a form of extended tissue, compiled by bookmakers using the same judgement-based methodology applied to runners who have not yet been entered. The ante-post market for the Gold Cup in November carries enormous uncertainty and correspondingly thick overrounds, as mentioned — up to 180 per cent on the Grand National ante-post book.
A free bet taken on an ante-post price is operating inside that thick-overround market. The implied value of the token is meaningfully lower than it would be taken against an opening-show fixed-odds price closer to the off. I do not often use free bets ante-post for this reason — the operator has structured the overround to reward the house disproportionately on long-dated wagers, and the token is not getting a fair run at the fair-value probability.
The exception is when the ante-post price is objectively long because the runner’s likelihood of participating is uncertain — a horse that may or may not make the line-up because of training setbacks or engagement decisions. In those cases the price reflects real uncertainty rather than compiler conservatism, and the free bet’s asymmetric-payoff structure can work in the punter’s favour. Non-Runner No Bet coverage on the ante-post position is essential here, because without it a withdrawn horse forfeits the stake entirely. For the broader settlement mechanics that tissue and ante-post prices feed into, see my piece on each-way bet settlement rules.
Reader questions on early-market forecasting
Do tissue prices include overround?
Yes. A tissue is a compiler’s forecast of where the bookmaker market will open, and the market always carries an overround. A typical UK racing tissue implies total probability of 115 to 125 per cent across all runners, matching the fixed-odds overround the compiler expects the market to settle at. This is why tissue prices should not be read as fair-probability estimates — they are market forecasts with operator margin baked in.
How accurate are forecast odds compared with SP?
Moderately accurate on midweek cards and materially less accurate on festival meetings. On a typical Wolverhampton all-weather card, forecast odds are within 20 per cent of SP for most runners. On Cheltenham Tuesday, drifts of 40 to 60 per cent are routine across the card. The compiler cannot model stake-flow distortions, and festival meetings carry the largest asymmetric stake patterns of the UK calendar.
Created by the ”Free Horse Racing Betting” editorial team.
