Bet With the Best: Expert Strategies from America's Leading Handicappers

Excerpt from the book hailed as the most comprehensive book on handicapping thoroughbred horseracers that has been published in over a decade. Written by DRF experts Andrew Beyer, Steve Davidowitz, James Quinn, Tom Brohamer, Steven Crist and many more. This excerpt is a courtesy of NBN Books, the book's distributor. Order your copy online!

CHAPTER 3: CRIST ON VALUE

BY STEVEN CRIST

Continued from Page 5

The Competition

There are races run every day in which a similar strategy can be employed. Knowing that a single 5-1 shot in fact has a true chance closer to 50-1 wipes out the entire takeout on a race. An intense dislike of a 3-1 shot can be an extremely powerful tool and the entire motivation for playing a particular race.

There are also plenty of races in which your competition will make no actionable mistakes. Everyone seems to be at about the right price, and there is no compelling reason to jump into the pool. It is worth remembering that the whole is better than the sum of its parts: The betting public's post-time favorite wins more often than any individual public handicapper, and over time first choices win more than second choices, which win more than third choices, and so on down the line. There is no shame in passing a race because you just don't see any value in it. Nor should you force yourself to play a race in which you have no confidence in your own odds line. That doesn't mean you have to sit on your hands-$1 boxes for action were made to fill the spaces between races where you have a legitimate edge or opinion.

Players who have never undertaken a value-based approach to handicapping will almost surely find it useful to begin making their own true-odds lines. It is cumbersome at first, but over time it becomes second nature, to the point where it can be done in your head and becomes the way you instinctively approach every race. However you choose to handicap horses is work that you do before the betting opens. As soon as those first prices go up on the board, you are looking for discrepancies between your odds and those set by your opponents.

Of course, it's tempting to anticipate those discrepancies by comparing your personal line with the early ones published in Daily Racing Form, which are made by either a DRF handicapper or the track's morning-linemaker. No mortal can resist a peek, but these early lines are widely misunderstood and misused-yet another opportunity for you to take an advantage.

A Daily Racing Form line is made 48 hours before a race. (A Saturday DRF is printed Thursday night so that you can buy it Friday and do your homework the night before the races.) It is a sincere effort to predict how the race will be bet, but because of the required printing window, it cannot incorporate early or late scratches, jockey changes, and prevailing track or weather conditions.

A track's morning line has even more pitfalls. It is typically prepared by a track employee in the racing office or simulcasting department whose primary skill in life may not be oddsmaking and whose agenda is different from yours. Tracks want to advertise their races as being competitive rather than mismatches, which is why horses we all know are going to be 3-5 are routinely listed at 6-5 on the morning line. Similarly, nearly every race card features several horses who are legitimately 99-1, but few morning-line prices exceed 30-1. Racing offices do not want to offend the horsemen filling their cards by saying their horses have virtually no chance.

Given all that, it is astounding how many horseplayers believe there is some magical significance to the morning line and to any discrepancies between it and the actual betting. If a horse is 4-1 on the morning line and 2-1 in the actual betting, plenty of your competitors will decide that this horse is a "good thing," the focus of an international betting coup orchestrated by the mysterious "they" who "know." If the same horse is instead 8-1 as post time approaches, the same conspiracy theorists will pronounce the horse "dead on the board." In fact, in either case, all that has happened is that the linemaker, an overworked and fallible human being like the rest of us, made a bad guess about how much the public would fancy a particular horse.

It is this sort of flawed thinking among your parimutuel opponents that creates incorrect prices on the board and thus opportunities for you. If some horses in a race are being overbet, that means that the prices are too high on the other horses and this is where you should be looking.

Is your competition offering you enough value to make this a profitable undertaking? Without discussing or judging anyone's method of handicapping, the answer is surely yes. There are enough people betting virtually at random, not even consulting complete past performances, to cover the takeout. Even among your well-informed opponents, the vast majority are betting with little consideration for the mathematics of value, which means that at least half the time they are betting on underlays and thus jacking up the prices on the overlays.

It's not an easy game, but you're not playing against "the game." You're betting against the other bettors. It doesn't matter if they pick as many winners as you do, or even more, if you are betting only when the price is right.

Continue reading.... Using Multiple Bets to Improve Your Prices

Home • Horse Racing Handicapping Forum • Free Racing Picks • Horse Racing News • Horse Racing Links