What to Bet and When: Part 1- Win, Place, Show at the Races

There are a lot of talented handicappers in the world. They have spent years determining which horses can and cannot win. In theory this should be the license they need to make wagering on horse races their sole income. So how come so few players can actually fulfill that fantasy?

Better Betting

The answer is simple, betting. Without question the most common admission you’ll hear at any given racetrack or OTB parlor is “I’m a great handicapper, but a lousy bettor.” For many the solution is to throw more money at wagers or try to find a way to pick even more winners. It has been my experience that both of these approaches are fruitless, particularly against the high takeout that racing has compared to its sports betting counterpart.

The bottom line is that in this game you will lose more than you will win. The game is not about consistent day over day profit, but about bankroll preservation, ticket construction, and maximization of opportunity. The purpose of this piece is to look at how you can begin to redesign your wagering strategy to become more profitable at the track.

Bankroll Management

It is impossible to talk about betting without first addressing bankroll management. There are several different theories on bankroll management and bet sizing, but most of them agree that individual bets should not take up more than 5% of your bankroll.

Sizing your Bet

Bet sizing should always be done in accordance with your confidence in a horse. If you think a certain horse is a lock, it may be worth the 5% allotment, but if your clever idea requires a fair amount of racing luck you may need to downsize to a 1% or 2% stake.

For example I may play $50 on a horse I really like, but only $20 on a horse I feel less sure about. On a $1000 bankroll both of these wagers would qualify under the maximum 5% allotted.

Players who prefer to bet the same amount in every race will need to be far more opinionated and only play horses they really like. In this case you may find it helpful to have a binary approach. Your two options are to have a strong opinion and bet $50 on our previous $1,000 bank or to watch the race as a fan with no stake.

Find the Wager that is Right for You-Win Place Show

In the first of our three part series we will tackle WPS (pronounced “whips”) or win, place and show bets. These are the oldest bets in horse racing. For many years these were the only wager options that horse players had. Today they have become far less popular, but can still offer great value in the proper spots.

When to Bet Win

Establish your top 3 selections in a race and assign each a fair odds value. You can do this using your own perception of how likely the horse is to win or get information from an outside source. Betting News offers win percentages for each horse in a race which can be converted to fair odds using a conversion calculator. Certain handicapping and betting products such as the Twinspires app have their own algorithms and will actually give you their fair value on each horse if you prefer.

Once you have fair odds on your top 3 selections, look to see if any of them are at higher prices than your fair odds. This is called an overlay. If multiple horses are overlaid bet the one that you have ranked the highest.

If there are no overlays in the race, this wager is not right for the race.

A word to the wise about win bets. There is a lag in horse racing between when the horses load into the gate and when the gates pop open. Late flashes of obscene amounts of money are not uncommon while the horses are in the gate. Be careful about playing favorites who are overlays by less than 1 point in the odds as they load for the start. These horses can often get crushed and become underlays when the totalizer accounts for the last flash.

When to Bet Place

Handicap the race for the top 3 horses in your opinion. Once you have your top 3 picks look at the win, place, and show pools for each one. Estimate the percentage of each pool on the horses. Occasionally you will find a weird phenomenon where horses get crushed in the win and show pools but get forgotten in the place pool.

This happens most frequently when pool sizes are massive, but can happen any day of the week at any track.

If you find a horse that has a significantly smaller percentage of the place pool than win and show bet the horse to place.

For example, your top selection has 30% of the money in the win pool, 14% of the money in the place pool, and 58% of the money in the show pool. This would be a great example of a time to bet the horse to place.

I will reiterate that the above situation is an extremely rare occurrence, but finding the times it does happen can allow you to make money even when your horse doesn’t win the race.

When to Bet Show

In general this bet is not one you want to dive into too much. The margins on victories are so small that one blemish in a string of correct opinions can be an insurmountable mountain to climb. Some like to use it if they like a long shot to hit the board, but my preference is to use that in a vertical exotic like the trifecta.

The two instances where I think show betting can make sense is in a WPS ladder or a “bridge jumper” situation.

Win Place Show Ladder

The concept for this one is that you ladder your bets. Place a small amount on a horse to win, a bigger amount on that horse to place, and a bigger amount on the horse to show. In theory if you’re right, the show needs to be big enough to cover the bet and the place and win bet are how you make your money. While this may seem like a good way to take out insurance on your selections it does require a sizable bankroll.

There are differing opinions on how this bet should be carried out, but I have always subscribed to the rule that a good ratio is 1:2:50. Using this ratio a player would need 1 unit to win, 2 units to place, and 30 units to show.

Let’s assume a player uses $2 as 1 unit. This bet would be $2 to win, $4 to place and $60 to show. That’s $66 on a single race which is 5% of a $1,320 budget. If the player’s horse comes in third and pays $2.10 to show the player would receive $63 a net loss.

This strategy should really only be considered when you like horses outside of 3-1 and only if you have the capital to support such a big wager.

“Bridge Jumper”

The one situation where I feel a straight show wager can be a good investment is when a player identifies a “bridge jumper” that they think has a legitimate chance to finish off of the board. This is a term “bridge jumper” refers to someone who is overbetting what they feel is a sure thing.

In this case you will see the show pool with an unusually large sum of money on a single horse to show. This often occurs at smaller tracks where a bet of $10,000 on a single horse could be 10 times the amount of money in the rest of the pool. If the horse fails to run, the show payouts will be massive.

The following example is based on a place bet, but the field was only 4 horses. In 2014 Heliskier was returning to Canterbury Park after being named horse of the year in 2013. However, if you had followed the horse over the winter at Oaklawn you could tell he wasn’t quite the same horse. That didn’t stop the Canterbury crowd from pounding Heliskier to 1-10 on his return performance.

While there was no show pool in the 4 horse field, the place pool was disproportionately tilted toward the colt. When the horse broke slow he could never get back into the race and finished third. The place payout on the 3-1 second choice was $10.80.

Again, I cannot stress the importance of the fact that for this bet to work, you must have reason to believe the favorite won’t hit the board.

Installments 2 and 3 of What to Bet and When

This article is the first in a series of 3. Installments two and three will cover vertical exotics and horizontal or mult-irace wagers respectively.