If you are trying to make money betting on horses and handicapping horse races, you may have already come to several conclusions. One conclusion you may have reached is that it's hard to make money playing the ponies. Another decision you may have reached is that you have to weigh the odds a horse is going off at against its chances of winning in order to make a profit.
In other words, your job as a handicapper is to evaluate a horse's form, speed, class, and connections and to determine what its chances of winning may be. If the same race was run 10 times, how many times would this horse win? If you think the horse would win 2 times out of ten and you bet a minimum of $1 per race, then your horse would have to pay 4-1 odds or better just for you to break even, since a horse at 4-1 odds pays $5 to win based on a $1 bet.
The whole process of finding value gets much more complicated when playing exotics especially when they involve three or more horses. I know many people who play trifectas like to keep the favorite in their combinations because they hit the board about 70% of the time, but they also like to include a few long priced horses in order to cash in on those longshots when they manage to get their noses into the trifecta.
While including long priced horses will help you to cash bigger trifecta tickets, it also will mean fewer times that you cash, and since it is so difficult to determine actually payoffs, it becomes a hit or miss process for most horse players. Wheeling a horse in the exacta is a little easier to do when you're trying to figure odds and payoffs because projected exacta payoffs are usually on display somewhere at the track or OTB.
If you think a horse has a 20% chance of winning and the lowest exacta payoff for the $1 exacta is $20, then that will become the break even point. Next you must compute the cost of the entire wheel bet based on the size of the field. In an 8 horse race a $1 exacta wheel costs $7. In order to break even in ten races, you would have to make a minimum of $35 to cover your bets. Therefore, a $20 payoff just won't do. But what if the lowest paying exacta isn't what your wheel produces? Perhaps a long shot will come in with your key horse and you'll cash a $100 ticket.
It is that uncertainty that appeals to risk takers and gamblers, but when struggling to make money and when profit is imperative, the straight win bet with a close approximation of the final payoff is the best method of betting on horse races for most handicappers.
If you want to learn how a horse owner and insider handicaps just go to http://horse-racing-handicapping.co/ and get the truth about betting on horses and winning. Bill Peterson is a former race horse owner and professional handicapper. To see all Bill's horse racing material go to Horse Racing Handicapping, Bill's handicapping store.
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