Betting Two Horses

Slow week last week with Thanksgiving and all. Horseracing took a back seat to family and the holiday, as it should.

After a prompt from Jason Beem, I thought about doing this week’s blog on the uncomfortable chemistry between Peyton Manning and Papa John on those pizza commercials, but I really didn’t have much more than what I just said. Although it did strike me that unless you are an accomplished jazz musician or a voodoo high priest you have no business referrring to yourself as “Papa.”

Here’s a note to advertising agencies. You are not obligated to use Phil Phillip’s song, Home, in every commercial. I’m not sure when I hear the song in the background if it is for insurance, car sales or something else. It also reminds me of a David Spade joke about Lynyrd Skynyrd. They only did two songs. Free Bird and Not Free Bird. Sorry Phil. Nobody but your most ardent fans can name your other songs. And that’s as much as I needed to say about that.

California Chrome won the Grade 1 Hollywood Derby, causing the folks at Del Mar to spew forth superlatives, including that he was the only horse to win four Grade 1’s this year, which is totally true if you ignore Main Sequence.  No real story here. He beat Lexie Lou, a filly with Canadian credentials and Talco , a three year old with a career as an allowance horse staring him in the face. Needless to say, based on the level of competition, Chrome didn’t cement his case for horse of the year.

I was going to talk about addicted gamblers, mostly based on one guy on Twitter who seems to bet a ton of races, gets ridiculously angry (almost ever time at the jockey) when he loses, and can’t wait to shout when he hits one. Pretty much every race. I wrote in detail about this in my article, Risk Intelligence, which you can find in the July archives, so I’m not going to go into detail again. But this is one of the warning signs of gambling addiction, getting really furious if you lose and over the top if you win.  I’ll just say, if this sounds like you, you might see if you have some of the other warning signs for addicted gambler.

Aqueduct ended it’s main dirt meet with a whimper when they took all the races off the turf on Cigar Mile Saturday and the inside part of the course was like playing like horses were running on a concrete moving walkway. Not much of a story there either.

However, on Cigar Mile Saturday if you had played my top two selections to win, you would have hit 5 of 10 races and your ROI would have been 63%. That means if you were betting $10 to win  on the top two horses in each race, you would have bet $200, collected $326.

The idea of playing multiple horses to win has been mentioned in a lot of books, including my book, The Condition Sign, and was developed as a strategy by Howard Sartin, a psychologist who treated addicted gamblers with the devilishly simple idea that the cure to chronic losing was winning.

Let me start with my maxim: In most cases it is more profitable to bet two horses to win than to bet one horse win and place. Whenever you hear people pumped up about their “ladder” bet, either they don’t understand the arithmetic of win and place betting, they need the psychological salve from a place bet, or they lose all the win photos their horses are involved in. Let’s look at the arithmetic.

We’ll start with the assumption that your top two choices both average 4-1 and that one of your top two selections wins 50% of the time, and your top choice wins 25% of the time and finishes second 15% of the time when it doesn’t win. The place price will be assumed as $5. There are three possibilities.

  • one of the two horses wins
  • your top choice does not win but finishes second
  • both finish out of the top two spots

For the sake of calculation, let’s say you either bet $10 to win on your top two choices or $10 win and place on your top choice.

In the case of betting two horses to win, in 100 races the total bet would be $2,000, the total collected would be $2,500. In the case of betting one horse to win and place, total bet would be $2,000, total collected wouild be $2,250. Of course, if you took the same $20 and put it on your top pick to win, you’d collect….$2,500. In other words, betting to win only is superior (using these assumptions) to ever betting win and place. I’d challenge you to do your own experiment picking two horses in a race and figuring out whether it would be more profitable to bet them both to win or pick one and divide the same amount win and place. Eventually you can get sophisticated enough to make win bets unequal based on your calculated win line, but that’s a different lesson.

Most people who bet place just can’t deal psychologically with the lower collection percentage, and I fully understand that. But you have to keep telling yourself, I’m better off in the long run not to bet place (most of the time).

Now I’ve read pieces that talk about betting against yourself if you bet two horses to win. For the most part, they are wrong, but I’ll concede it depends as much on your successful selection rate as anything.

The one time I think you are justified in making a place bet is when your horse is at big odds, and again it is for psychological reasons. Not long ago I had a horse just get nipped at 37-1 and I believe it would have been devastating to not make some collection. Besides, the place mutuel was better than the vast majority of win mutuels.

I realize this is a bit of a grinding way to win, and for that reason I would concede that it is fine to budget half your bankroll for win bets and half for exotics. That is maxim number two: half of the money you bet should be to win.  If you play well, there is plenty of opportunity for profit.