Horse Racing Handicapping Book 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 4

The Competition

One of the great romantic myths of racing is that the players are a merry band of brothers united in their quest to smoke out the winner of each race. This is the case at the blackjack table, where everyone is playing against the house and all the players win when the dealer busts out. At the racetrack, however, every bettor is playing only against the other bettors. The house takes its cut off the top and has no financial interest in how the remaining money is carved up.

If every horseplayer but you were a certifiable idiot, betting at random on names and colors, you would win every day. Conversely, if the only people betting into the pool were the small number of professionals who make a living this way, your chances for long-term victory would be slim.

Either way, what would make you a loser or a winner would not be a change in the number of winners you bet, but solely the odds that these horses would return. To put this another way: Your opportunity for profit at the racetrack consists entirely of mistakes that your competition makes in assessing each horse's probability of winning. P>In that first happy scenario, where the escaped lunatics are betting at random, you would win because you would bet on high-probability horses at fat odds. Every horse in a seven-horse field would be 5-1 (after takeout) and you would just bet on those with a better than 20 percent chance of winning. Playing purely against the pros, every horse would be bet in accordance with his true chances, and takeout would reduce each return below an acceptable price. You would be taking the worst of it every time.

Reality combines these two situations, since both nitwits and sharpies populate the betting pools every day. Has the balance shifted? There has been much carping in recent years that the game has become much tougher, or even "too tough." The game almost surely was easier 50 years ago when takeout was lower and track attendance was much higher, due primarily to racing's near-monopoly on legalized gambling. Unfortunately, the hordes of fabled two-dollar bettors of that era have mostly been seduced away by the jackpots of state lotteries and slot machines, and the industry has raised takeout to compensate for lost business.

Does that mean today's player faces nothing but higher vigorish and the remaining sharpies? Not at all. I firmly believe that, in general, the nitwits still outnumber the sharpies. More important, most sharpies aren't as sharp as they think, and even the winning sharpies make plenty of egregious mistakes on individual races. As long as the volume of ill-informed money exceeds the takeout, there can be a positive expectation for the true sharpshooter who waits for the competition to make mistakes.

How do we identify, and thus attack, this ill-informed money? There is no such thing as a bet that cannot possibly win, since every horse has a theoretical, if infinitesimal, chance of winning any race, if only because every single opponent theoretically could fall down. What defines sucker money is not the horse selected, but the acceptance of odds on that horse that are substantially out of line with its chances of winning.

For an example, let's return to the 2001 Kentucky Derby. Balto Star to win is not necessarily a bad proposition. However, Balto Star at 8-1 is a horrendous proposition. A one-dimensional front-runner does win the Derby about once every eight or 10 years, but never when there is a glut of other high-quality speed in the race. So perhaps Balto Star is a legitimate 8-1 shot in a vacuum. For Balto Star to have won this Derby, however, Songandaprayer and Keats both would have had to take back off the lead. Even if you thought there was a 50 percent chance that each of them would be taken back, that makes it only 25 percent that both would, so you have to apply that against Balto Star's 8-1 in a vacuum and now he's more like 32-1. My assigning him a 4 percent chance of victory may have been overly generous.

At 8-1, however, Balto Star was eating up over 10 percent of the win pool, better than half the takeout. Eliminating him alone still left you better than 95 percent likely to win while cutting the takeout to 6 percent. Tossing others with even more microscopic scenarios for victory-Songandaprayer, Keats, Talk Is Money-would have allowed you to have a positive expectation on the race.

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