First, many thanks to Seth Abrams for running down Mark Cramer and getting an elucidating 30 minute interview. He reminded me of the whole point of betting horses: find value. So I’m going to post some of the stuff I’ve written previously on value.

Which brings me to this. Anyone who says, I’m going to try to beat Horse A with Horse B because Horse A’s odds are “too low” doesn’t understand value. It’s one thing to say, Horse B has a higher probability of winning, or Horse B has a 20% chance of winning but his odds will be 10-1, but it is misleading to suggest you should pass Horse A just because Horse B has higher odds, and you’ll see exactly what I mean in one of my examples below.

This is one of the great fallacies of horseracing – that you can’t make money at 8-5. You may not be able to make a lot of money in one fell swoop, but if you think that a horse at 8-5 (39% chance) has a 60% chance of winning, 8-5 represents a pretty nice overlay. And even if your “second choice” is at 5-1 (17% chance), unless you think that horse really should be 2-1, your only legitimate win bet is to bet the 8-5 horse.

Look, every horseplayer has an unshakable opinion on a race he is interested in. Just because I think one horse is better than another and you think exactly the opposite, doesn’t make me right or wrong. Only the running of the race can do that. There is only one way to bet to win, and that is to FIND SOLID OVERLAYS. Period.

The mathematics of betting are very simple. If you are a good handicapper and you can assess a horse’s probability of winning (or finishing second or third) and you limit your bets to those races where the difference between the tote odds and your odds reaches a certain threshold value, you will make money.

The outfits that say, I’ll only bet this horse at 4-1 or greater without telling you what they think the horse’s probabilities are, simply cannot understand the mathematics of winning. A horse that is 40% in your opinion is a great bet at 5-2 or higher. He is at least a reasonable bet at 2-1.

Believe me, the good public handicappers either do that overtly or in general. When they try to steer you to a 20-1 horse, they better say, this horse has at least a 15% chance of winning the race, because in my opinion at less than 15%, you just aren’t picking reliable animals.

Let me use some races from the Thursday July 3 card at Belmont to illustrate some points.

The third race wound up as a 4 horse field. The favorite, La Verdad, was 1-9, a 90% probability according to the crowd. He was an impossible and foolish win bet, even at those odds because HE WAS NOT AN OVERLAY. And if someone said, we’re going to try to beat La Verdad with Willet, Willet would have only been a legitimate win bet if you honestly believed that he had a higher probability of winning than his tote board odds. If you hear something like, if La Verdad doesn’t win, Willet probably will, and you don’t hear what they think the probabilities are, they aren’t doing the right amount of work. Willet in that race went off at a little over 7-2 (22%). Now if you believed La Verdad was 60% and Willet was 33% (2-1), by all means you should have bet Willet. Otherwise, maybe you could have looked at a cold exacta which turned a 1-9 shot into even money, actually a pretty substantial overlay. If La Verdad was 90% to win, Willet might have been 90% to place, meaning any exacta that paid more than $3.00 was a good parimutuel play. Whether or not Willet was a win bet was wholly dependent on what you thought his odds of winning the race were, not only that he was the only horse with a chance of upsetting La Verdad.

Let’s look at one other race from that day, the 6th. Here was my line.

Horse                Track Odds               My Odds

1.                              39-1                           50-1
2.                                9-5                               5-2
3.                              SCR
4.                                4-1                               6-1
5.                             12-1                            20-1
6.                                3-1                               7-5
7.                                2-1                               3-1

What’s the play here? A win bet on the 6 horse and a reasonably healthy exacta, 6/2. The 6 was at least a 100% overlay for me. If you wanted to bet a trifecta, it would have been   6/2/4,7. The 6 won the race by a comfortable length and a half, the 2 gave me some nervous moments but closed to grab second by a head, and the 4 finished third. (When you read my blog post entitled Risk Intelligence, you’ll understand why you should use the 4 and the 7.) The winner paid $8.20, the exacta was $35, and the trifecta was $95. This was a six horse race with a winner at 3-1 and the favorite second, and it was a prime bet for me.

Now your line could have been different, and I am certainly not right every time (or even most of the time), but you will never hear me say, I’m going to try to beat the 2 with the 6. I’m going to say, the 6 is the value. And on my line, no other horse was.

I’m going to give you two pieces on value betting in my next two blogs. Trust me. If you don’t know this stuff, your chances of being a winning player go down considerably.