I've never understood why racing isn't more popular amongst poker players. Perhaps it's marketed too much as regal, royal and pretty and not enough as a bet.

There's two common mindsets that players of both games share. 1) I don't want to beat the house. I want to beat my peers. 2) If I'm patient and I play good I win.

There's a disconnect in the 1st train when it comes to racing. You don't get to look your oponents in the eye and know instantly who you defeated. But the first time you select a 30-1 winner, you'll likely note there won't be any waiting in line to cash your ticket. You're one of the only winners in that contest and everyone you beat is tearing theirs up.

The 2nd train is true, but you need a disposition that accepts being wrong and losing when you are. Even the best players are wrong 70% of the time. Me, I'm incorrect 80% of the time. The problem for poker players taking up horse racing in the early stages reads something like, 'I just spent an hour handicapping the race. All the data says the 4 should've won at 2-1. How is it the 9 could've won at 14-1? How did that guy over there who just cashed think to play him?'

Advice to beginners. Get used to being wrong a lot. Avoid favorites. Use 'em only as money saving leverage animals in cold doubles. Never hedge your bets. Pass races where you have no opinion or the opinions you do have are weak. Never let another player influence your selection process. It's your money. Bet your opinion. Bet agressively so that when you're right you're gonna get paid. For example, suppose you handicap two full cards, 18 races total, and one runner seems like your best bet(most likely winner)for the day. He's 4-1 on the morning line. You think he has a 50% chance of winning. You're willing to accept 2-1 post time odds which is still a 100% overlay vs. your opinion. It comes time for your horse to race and he's dead on the board at 7-1 with 1 minute to post. What do you do? Bet more! You loved him at 4 and were willing to take 2. If you're right now you're getting 7. Double up, hell triple up.

The last piece of advice to beginners I will give is this. Know which kind of player you are and focus your efforts in the area that best suits you. This will save the rookie many wasted months, perhaps years of research geared towards other players and not you. There's 3 fundamental groups of horse players. 1) Numbers analysts. 2) Problem Solvers. 3) Visual Analysts.

The game is great. It's hard. It's beatable. Nothing worthwhile is easy.

18%+ hold, plus breakage.

I play for entertainment, and I will sometimes play large carryovers for profit.

Pretty much this.

Breakage is just robbery now with so much handle being wagered online.

I was under the impression that it was rigged, that horse X didn't win this time because it wasn't "his turn to win"

Any truth in that ? (UK horce racing)

I used to go to the track regularly. It was a long time ago so maybe I forgot but I have no idea what "breakage" is.

+1

you are not the only one.


All I know about horse racing is I went to a casino 2 weeks ago that I have never been to. I parked by the track and when I walked in I played $10 on number 4 to win because I parked in zone 4. 4 won at 12-1. Betting on horses is just that easy.

Horse racing is fun, and certainly challenging. You are going against other bettors, not against the house, so in that way it is similar to poker. But the house rake is huge, and you have to be very consistent to beat the "rake".

And if you ever figure out a horse is 50% to win and the odds are 7-1 then either 1) the betting public is terribly wrong about the horse's chances or 2) you are terribly wrong about the horse's chances; or 3) you both are wrong. But there are very few races where any horse will have a 50% chance to win - so you might want to reevaluate if you have a horse at better than even money and he isn't even favored.

I have a friend that has been in the racing business (as a trainer at major tracks) for decades. He says that if he had a nickel for every sure thing that didn't win he'd have millions. I figure that if he can't win consistently, I have pretty much no shot at it. So I do it occasionally just for fun, but I don't believe I have any kind of edge.

Payoffs are rounded down to .20 -- so a parimutuel payoff of 3.99 will pay 3.80 for $2. This "rounded" $2 payoff then becomes the basis for all other tickets -- so a $100 ticket can have a hold in breakage that's near 10% over and above the stated vig.

I don't know of any evidence that shows that it's beatable long term?

Is anyone +EV vs the 18+%????

There's a restaurant I like that's an OTB site, and I made one wager this year -- just because it was a race in mud -- a $24 four horse $1 tri box. It paid a little over $700 -- so I'm up this year. Some years are not as good

About 15 years ago I wrote a computer program to handicap races, and pieced together past performance data for a couple seasons at a half dozen tracks. I tweaked it for several months, and it made a few bucks, but it wasn't worth it. It picked mostly chalk, and at that time I had to be at the track to make bets. If I made the wagers in advance, I usually wished I hadn't when I saw final odds -- so I was betting live. That took a lot of time. Interestingly, a couple years later I rewrote it and built data for dogs -- it was much better with dogs than horses. I played that for quite a while, but it still took too much time -- and the pools are too small, so you're killing yourself with your own bets. My guess is that it's a lot easier to get digital data for PP and entries today, but only the feature races in the US get any decent size pools going.

Good spots still occasionally come up or are created.

If you're asking if anybody could flat bet a large % of the currect races under those conditions and rate to win I'd say no.

Some pretty good replies. Thank you.

I agree the takeout in horse racing is too high. Some ADW's(advanced deposit wagering)sites offer rebates. For the serious player high takeout equals less bets. When you 'cap it's wise to write a minimum odds threshold. It's annoying when a winner you picked goes off too low to play. It happens, but you'll be pleasantly surprised how much the overbet and underlaid steam horse you chose loses too.

One thing I advise to new players is: Keep records of all your bets. It can be a 4 column ledger. 1)Date/Track/Race#. 2)Race condition/Distance/Surface. 3)Bet type/Amount invested. 4)Plus/Minus amount. This will help you figure out where you're good and where you're not and if the perception of yourself, good or bad is illusory.

Someone asked whether the game can be beat long term. It can. You have to love it though. If the research and data gathering isn't fun it's unlikely you'll succeed. It takes dedication. It takes patience. You must pass races. You have to summon all your courage when you do wager and clobber the bet.

I disagree with the statement that nothing but prohibitive favorites can have a true chance of winning that's 50%. The 4-1 line to 7-1 post at 50% true odds was a real horse. A technical example, but one worth listing. At times a surface can become speed biased. All recent races are won wire to wire, by widening lengths. The race is devoid of early speed except two runners. One is clearly faster early. The problem and the reason he's dead on the board is: he's been laid off since September of his 3 year old season and returns as a June 4 year old. 8 months. His figures at 3 were consistently a half to 2 and a half lengths too slow to win this. However, he has a good trainer, a workout pattern that fits in with the trainer's layoff successes, and with normal improvement from 3 to 4 he's half length the best. Couple that with his probable lone frontrunner style and it's not a stretch to give him a 50% chance at winning. Lone F+Speed Bias+Age Improvement+Layoff Connections=50%.

Why is it that people who play the ponies are always the most susceptible to the narrative fallacy?

You're likely correct. No argument here. Fine line between confidence and hubris which I cross repeatedly.

It's not really a fine line -- it's a human failure. Handicappers always have a narrative to explain why they didn't pick the winner, why their pick didn't come in, why they missed the superfecta, and most importantly -- why they won't miss it in the future -- because they will do the part-wheel that they knew they should have played ... blah, blah, blah.

My approach to the game is never emotional -- and I've had only limited success. I'm never invested in the analysis of a single race -- only in the outcome. I have no narrative -- I only have opportunities that eventually result in winners and losers.

The narrative fallacy is not a fine line between confidence and hubris -- it is a delusional belief that the future will someday conform with the beliefs of the narrator.

I don't mean to be harsh -- but OGG is a pretty good forum, and how cliche has all of three posts explaining racing to a group of people who likely have forgotten more than he ever knew. Welcome, how cliche -- but do some reading before offering advice. The advice you're offering sounds like a Wikipedia entry -- and the audience here is quite a bit more sophisticated than that. If you want to present methods, I'll wager that someone here will run simulations and give you an expected value. OTOH -- If you have a method that actually works, my guess is that you will not want to present it here -- but you will find others who understand the nuance of "unpublished" strategies, and your cryptic conversations may be beneficial.

I don't perceive the above as harsh. I don't perceive the previous one as harsh either. Believe it or not I appreciate them both. I especially needed to hear the narrative fallacy comment. My narrative fallacy occurs more prior to the result than after. I always think if I can't write a mutitude of reasons to back an entry then I have no business competing against my foes. Should I be able to go on and on rambling attributes onto my keyboard, I tend to become wedded to the selection. It's a shortcoming. I ignore the merits of the rest of the field. When I lose, which is often, I indeed perform dead race analysis. All part of the narrative fallacy. One of many flaws to my approach.

I should indeed be less cryptic and less general. We should peruse something coming up and compare and contrast our opinions.

My apologies.

Perhaps some day. As you know, it can definitely be a complex game -- and there are always new insights that help the game -- but it's a very tough vig to overcome. Certainly no apologies needed.

By your money management you seem to have hit the same win rate I was at, which just wasn't enough for the time. But I still like the carry-over pools ...

A guy i know is up around 50-60 points over the last year not a huge sample size but pretty good return

His sample size is around 400 races

Problem is -- 400 is a lot of races -- even if you like a lot of races, it could take months.

Yeah it's over the space of a year

If you take a look at pricewise they are the only place i know what have made a profit over a huge sample size

Sorry got my figures wrong he's up 105 points over 12 months

The sample is around 400 cant give exact number

Horse racing is, very frequently, a self-defeating game. WPS has the lowest track hold, but the smallest pools. You need to know that with a ~$20k win pool, a $500 win bet will move your 40:1 --> 20:1, a $1,000 win bet will move your 20:1 --> 10:1, a $2,000 win bet will move your 10:1 --> 5:1. This may not mean much if you're playing $20 bets, but what look like opportunities can go away when you play them big -- and no matter how good of a handicapper you are, you can't scale your wagering up if your bets are in the pool -- there is a very real limit to what you can realistically wager. This causes many players to move into exotic bets, where a $2,000 wager is chasing a $2 opportunity -- but the hold on many of these bets is ~35% ...

In my opinion, you'll find better opportunities betting in public markets -- and if you stay on the big boards, it's highly unlikely that any (private) position you take will move the market. The market game is a lot more corrupt than horse racing, but that offers the player a unique opportunity to simply factor in the manipulation -- if you know who's doing it (and why). I will wager that if you simply chart the past performance of stocks touted by Jim Cramer, and interpret his "qualifications" in the same way you would a past performance "comment line" (decipher the code) -- you'll find that the market responds to his comments in predictable ways, and you can profit from that knowledge. Handicap the PP of the short term narrative of the "experts", not the fundamentals. And the best part is -- the vig is just the trading fee.

I went to the track for many years and still do on occasion for fun.

Everyone has covered the basics. The takeout is high. Not crippling, but high. If you bet a lot and do it online, you can get a rebate (basically, rakeback). (Playing online also avoids live betting expenses, such as admissions, seats, parking, gas, and food.)

The result of the high takeout is that to be consistently profitable, you have to wait for good opportunities. The only theoretically +EV plays in horse racing are plays where you have not only identified an "overlay" (i.e., a situation where the public has underbet a particular horse or combination) but where the overlay covers the 15-25 percent takeout PLUS the breakage (the amount the track gets by rounding off payoffs to the nearest 5 or 10 cents). Thus, you have to pass lots of races.

Further, the sport is less popular than it used to be, with fewer casual players, which means you are betting against a smarter, more sophisticated wagering pool. That means fewer overlays, even if you didn't have to deal with such a high takeout.

Finally, it actually takes a lot of detailed analysis AND intuition to properly handicap a horse race. Winning players are experts about a whole bunch of things-- trainers, form cycles, track biases, trips, breeding, horses for courses, etc., and can synthesize them into a viable opinion about how a race will be run. Picking up a racing form, spending five minutes, and saying "I like this one because he ran a good speed figure in his last race at the same distance" isn't much better than "I like this one because he has a cute name and his jockey is wearing blue silks".

P.S.: I disagree with Sheetwise, though; I think the stock market is almost certainly unbeatable long term unless you have preferential access to information. At least in horse racing there really are information asymmetries between handicappers.