#TheAction: Keep It Simple

10.11.2016

Basic Action: Once you’ve seen the potential payouts for exotic bets, like trifectas or superfectas, it’s easy to get carried away and try to hit a big ticket. For example, in the 2005 Kentucky Derby, a $2 trifecta bet paid a whopping $133,134.80, and a $2 superfecta bet paid $864,253.50. But remember, scoring a big-money exotic bet takes a lot of skill, and even more luck. 

Even when you’re extremely confident in your picks, you need the race to unfold perfectly — from the perspective of the horse’s ability, the trip the horse gets and the pace of the race. It’s hard enough to predict the winner of a race, let alone picking the top three or four finishers. So, my advice is to keep it simple. 

Keeping it simple means defaulting to our basic bets: win, place and show. Sure, the payouts don’t always appear to be as sexy but they’re a lot safer and they can still pay pretty well, if bet correctly.

Advanced Action: The situation in which it’s always best to scale back to the more basic, conservative bets is when you’ve already identified a horse that represents good value. Remember, value refers to horses going off at odds that are higher than what the bettor projects to be fair (for example, a horse who should be 2-1 in the eyes of the bettor who is going off ‪at 10-1). 

If you’re getting a big price (based on win odds like 10-1) on a horse you like, don’t get greedy. Sure, you’ll make a lot of money if you hit an exotic ticket with a 10-1 runner on top, but you may cut into your profit margin by trying to hit a big trifecta or superfecta. 

Even at the base bet of $1, the cost of your ticket can add up in a hurry if you try to box, key, or wheel (terms previously covered on #TheAction) your horse with/over other horses in the race. Plus, there’s no guarantee that the horses you add to your ticket will complete the exacta, trifecta or superfecta — and there’s nothing worse than watching your horse win at odds of 10-1, without having a single winning ticket to show for it. 

Using our example of a horse at odds of 10-1, if you bet $20 to win, place and show ($60 total wager), you’d be looking at the following returns (there’s large variation here from race to race, but these are just some rounded up ballpark estimates based on a win, place, show returns of $22.40, $9.20 and $4.60):

If the horse wins: $360

If the horse finishes second: $140

If the horse finishes third: $46

So, even if your horse finishes second, you are likely to more than double your $60 investment. For that same $60 investment you could box your 10-1 horse with four others in a trifecta and come up with nothing to show for it if the third-place finisher happens to be a horse you didn’t select. 

The same applies to keying your “price horse” over several other horses. Unless you catch another nice price underneath, there’s even the possibility that your $1 trifecta bet won’t return more than the $360 that would’ve been collected on a much safer $20 win, place, show bet. Besides, if you lock yourself into keying a horse like a 10-1 shot on top — meaning they have to win the race — then you might as well invest that $60 in a straight win bet, which would return a payout in excess of $660!

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