Bull Riding and the PBR

To us here in the UK, the sport of bull riding is a pretty alien concept.

That’s no surprise really considering the fact that bull riding is illegal in this country, and therefore, so is betting on it; but this is not the case everywhere.

Bull riding is one of the fastest growing sports in the USA, for example, where it is particularly popular in the Western states, and it is also popular in Mexico, Brazil, Canada, and Australia amongst other countries.

For a long time it was a fairly niche sport, despite having been around since the 1500s, and it was mainly those who worked on ranches or who were from areas where rodeos were common that showed any interest.

Then in 1992 the PBR (Professional Bull Riders) was formed, and they attempted to take the sport mainstream.

It’s a little like the story of the UFC, and although bull riding hasn’t reached those sorts of dizzying heights yet, popular TV shows like ‘Yellowstone’ in which bull riding plays a significant role, and documentaries like ‘The Ride’ which follows a team of bull riders, are doing a lot to help it on its’ way.

So if you are one of the many Brits who has suddenly become aware of bull riding and the PBR, and are wondering how the sport works and how people bet on it, this article is for you.

How the Sport of Bull Riding Works

What a lot of people don’t realise, is that bull riding is actually as much about the bull as it is about the rider, so the bulls are looked after extremely well.

Bucking bulls are a specific breed of cattle bred purely for the sport of bull riding, and trained to understand what to do and when. They do not buck because they are unhappy about having a person on their backs, they buck because they have been trained to compete.

They are fairly similar to race horses in this regard, with their lineage being recorded and studied by those in the industry. Unlike race horses, the bulls are never agitated into bucking (jockeys use the whip on horses) – if they refuse to buck, they refuse to buck, although this rarely happens.

As for the riders, well they come from far and wide, but most have some sort of history with horses and other rodeo events. All are cowboys and will have other relevant skills such as roping and the like.

That’s a good distinction to make actually; a rodeo is an event in which many other events take place, rather than an event in and of itself.

Think of it a bit like a big fair, but as well as rides, stalls, food and drink, there are bronco riding, steer handling, a calf roping events taking place too. Bull riding was part of the rodeo scene before breaking away to become a professional sport in its own right, but you can still find bull riding at a rodeo.

Before a bull riding event each rider is randomly matched with a bull, although sometimes the rider can pick from a roster, and the bull will only ever ride once per event. This means a lot of bulls are needed for bull riding.

Now let’s look at the rules of the sport.

The Objective

Bull riding is a competition between the bull and the rider, with the bull attempting to buck the rider off and the rider attempting to stay on the bull’s back.

Judges watch each ride and score both the rider and the bull out of 50 points each; so the final result is out of 100.

The rider must stay on the bull’s back for at least 8 seconds for the ride the qualify; if they are bucked off before this time they score zero points, although the bull is scored regardless of what happens to the rider.

Important things to note here are that the rider must always have one hand in the flank strap – which is essentially a rope that attaches their hand to the bull – and one hand in the air, known as their free arm or non-riding arm.

If they let go of the flank strap, touch the bull or themselves with their free arm (known as a slap), or any part of their body touches the ground, the ride is over.

However, until one of these things happens, the clock keeps ticking and that 8 second milestone gets closer.

Even if a rider is in the process of being bucked off, the clock does not stop until either they slap, let go of the rope, or a part of their body touches the ground.

This means a rider can technically complete an 8 second ride as they fall, as was the case when J.B Mauney famously made the 8 on his 13^th attempt riding the infamous bull, Bushwacker, who only had 3 qualified rides in 87 outs.

The timer got to 8 seconds just as J.B was being bucked off; he survived by approximately a tenth of a second.

Scoring

Two or four judges are used to score each ride.

If there are two judges, then they score the bull and rider out of 25 points each, creating a total of 50 possible points from each judge. If there are four judges, they do the same thing, but the scores are dived by two to find an average.

In the PBR, however, there are four judges, and two score the bull (25 points each) while the other two score the rider (25 points each).

The bull is scored on the drop in their front end, the height of the kick in the back, the way they spin and twist, and if they change direction.

Basically, the bull is scored on how difficult they make the ride for the rider, and how unpredictably they move.

The rider is scored on how well they control the ride, their balance, style, and if they spur the bull to encourage extra bucks (i.e making it harder for themselves).

So it’s all about how well they predict the bull’s movements and keep up with them, as well as how easy they make that look.

Crucially, the rider is only scored on what happens inside the 8 second window, so if they hang on for longer and either make mistakes or demonstrate especially good skill, this will not be factored in to the final score.

The score of the bull and the rider are added together to give an overall score out of 100.

If a bull doesn’t give the rider much to work with, a re-ride may be offered by the judges. This allows the rider to try again on a different bull to attempt a higher score, but the risk is that they get bucked off and score nothing at all.

Scores of 90 points or higher are considered to be outstanding, and only the best riders will achieve this sort of level.

On top of this, there is event scoring for the riders.

The rider’s points for the whole event are totted together, and they can also earn extra points for being in the top 10 scorers of the day, for example, then at the end of the event the rider with the highest score overall becomes the champion of that event.

Bull Riding Competition Formats

Anyone can run a bull riding competition, not just the PBR, so there are numerous formats outs there, but we will cover the two most common.

Generally, a bull riding competition will run over a few nights, with each rider attempting one ride per night.

It’s every man for himself, and at the end of the competition the rider with the most points scored across all rides will win the competition.

There are some that run as knock outs as well, it just depends.

In 2021, however, the PBR introduced team competitions for the first time, and these are set to be the future of bull riding as a mainstream sport.

A team of riders is put together via a two-stage draft process, followed by free agency where teams can recruit anyone they fancy who has not been drafted.

In this way they will pull together a team consisting of 7 protected roster riders and 5 reserve riders. The coach chooses 5 riders to compete per event, a bit like a football manager having a full squad of players to choose from but only fielding 11 (plus subs) per match.

There are 8 PBR teams, and they face each other in a season long competition lasting 4 months and consisting of 11 events. Each event lasts two or three days, and each team will have one event held in their home town.

In each event there are four 5 v 5 head-to-head matches, in which one team faces another and tries to score the most points across 5 rides.

The interesting thing about this, is that the 5 randomly chosen bulls are assigned to the team by the PBR, but the team coach can decide which rider to put against which bull, and in what order, so there is a more tactical element employed.

Prizes are given to the winners, with more money going to the more successful team and/or riders, and intricately decorated belt buckles are another common prize.

What is the Professional Bull Riders (PBR)?

Put simply, the PBR is an international professional bull riding organisation, which runs competitive bull riding events and tries to promote the sport as far and wide as possible.

Set up in 1992, the organisation ran their first series of events in 1993, progressing to their first ever championship in 1994.

Although it started off small, the PBR now has more than 800 riders registered and organises events in many different countries, more than 3 million people attend their live events each year, and an estimated 100 million watch on TV.

Most impressively, at the end of each season, the rider who takes the title of champion is given a $1 million bonus. That’s a good indication of how far the sport has come.

It’s also thanks to the PBR than many of the enhanced safety features have come into common use, such as protective vests and helmets, and their tours run throughout the year in the USA and beyond, spreading the word of bull riding and encouraging best practice to anyone who takes part.

For almost 30 years the PBR ran bull riding competitions pitching individual bull riders against each other, but then in 2022, they introduced the PBR Teams Series, taking the sport up a notch, and creating something unique in the bull riding world.

This new format would see franchises created, and these teams would build their own roster of bull riders who would then compete with their team mates against others, creating a league of sorts.

There are 8 teams in the PBR Teams series:

• Arizona Ridge Raiders
• Austin Gamblers
• Carolina Cowboys
• Kansas City Outlaws
• Missouri Thunder
• Nashville Stampede
• Oklahoma Freedom
• Texas Rattlers

As you can see from the map, the teams are all in states associated with livestock and ranch life, although there are plenty of states like this without a team, so there is certainly room for more franchises to be created.

As it stands, these 8 teams go head-to-head with each other across several events to find an ultimate winner, with the best performing individual also being celebrated at the end of the season.

All of this success made the PBR an attractive proposition for existing sport and entertainment giants, and in 2015 Endeavour – the same company that owns the UFC (told you there were similarities) – bought the company to add to their portfolio.

It hasn’t changed the way things are done though, but it does probably mean that we can expect bull riding to get bigger and bolder as the years go on.

Greatest PBR Bull Riders

All bull riders are pretty ballsy folk; it takes a certain sort of crazy to want to mount a 2,000lb animal known for its’ aggression, and then let them throw you around.

Anyone who has the guts to try it has our respect, but there are some legends of the sport whose names a revered more than the average rider.

These folks are veterans of the sport, all of whom are also in the ’90 Club’ – a list of riders who have scored 90 or more from a ride during an official event.

Here are the top 5 riders ranked by the number of 90+ point rides they have achieved in their careers so far, as well as their career earnings:

This is our top 5 rather than any sort of official list, and only as of 2023.

You could argue that J.B Mauney should be above Chris Shivers, for example, because he has made twice as much money, but then Shivers has achieved the same number of 90+ rides as J.B but in around 400 fewer outs…

Even if you disagree with how we have come to our conclusion, it can’t be denied that these are 5 of the finest bull riders in the PBR.

Greatest PBR Bulls

The bulls get the same sort of respect as the riders in bull riding, so their achievements are held in just as high regard.

There are bulls that are nothing short of legends in the sport, still talked about long after retirement, and even brought out for fans to see and have photographs with in some cases.

There is no official ‘greatest bucking bull’ list out there, but when asked for their opinions, some of the best riders mentioned the following bulls most often:

We ranked them based on their average score but also took the number of outs and the buck off percentage into consideration.

It should also be said that some of these bulls were still competing at the time of writing, so the numbers could change.

Betting on Bull Riding

We have already told you that bull riding is not legal in the UK, so it stands to reason that you can’t bet on it here either.

That said, it is possible to bet on bull riding using an online bookmaker as of 2023 thanks to OpenBet, who were the first platform provider and odds trader to offer prices on PBR events.

It is perhaps no surprise that it is OpenBet who are the ones pioneering bull riding on the betting front, since they are owned by none other than Endeavour, the very same company which owns the PBR.

Despite this link, it certainly seems like there is enough interest to warrant opening a book on bull riding given that 100 million people are thought to watch it in one way or another, and with bull riding gaining in popularity that number is likely to grow too.

What’s more, research showed that Professional Bull Riding fans are a massive 89% more likely to bet than the average member of the general public, so it’s an untapped market for sure.

As for the sorts of bets you can make, well it’s still early days, but the following can be expected:

• Rider to qualify/not to qualify
• Over/under on ride length
• Competition winner team
• Competition champion
• Rider to slap Y/N
• Over/under on rider score
• Over/under on bull score
• Over/under on total ride score
• Rider to get highest event score

There are bound to be more than this, but these seem like pretty obvious markets for the bookies to offer and for the punters to want to place.

FAQ

Hopefully most of your questions about bull riding have been answered above, but here are a few topics we wanted to cover in a little more detail: