Horse Betting 101: How to bet on Horse Racing
There are many different types of bets in horse racing. This can make knowing how to bet on horse racing difficult. In this article we’ll cut through the jargon to make horse betting much more straightforward.
This guide tells you how to bet on horse racing in a few different ways. What does it mean to win/place/show? What is a trifecta? What is a superfecta? What is an exacta? Do the different racing surfaces matter?
Then, we round out our discussion of how to bet on horse racing by looking at some existing strategies and how we would build a horse betting model.
Basic Horse Racing Bets
The three most common words you’ll hear in horse racing are “win, place, and show”. These are three different types of bets you can make depending on how confident you are on a horse winning.
Betting on a horse to win means that you only win the bet if the horse finishes first. The amount you win by successfully picking the winning horse is computed by:
- Adding up all money bet on all horses to win
- Taking off 10-20% for the “house fee” (kind of like a rake in poker)
- Distributing the remaining money to all those who correctly picked the winning horse. The amount you get is proportional to the size of your bet, i.e. a $20 bet wins twice as much as a $10 bet.
Similarly, you can also bet on a horse to place or to show. Betting on a horse to place is successful if that horse finishes in the top 2. A show bet is successful if the horse finishes in the top 3.
Place bets and show bets typically have smaller payouts, though, because the pot is split more ways. More people win because two horses lead to payouts in a place bet and three lead to payouts in a show bet. This corresponds to the bets being easier to land.
Exotic Bet Types
There are other bet types in addition to simple win, place, and show. Knowing how each of these bets work is key to knowing how to bet on horse racing.
The first exotic horse racing bet is the trifecta. The trifecta requires picking the horses that come in first, second, and third in the race in order. This is the same as placing a successful win, place, and show bet on the same race! Because of this difficulty of getting all three right, the payouts are typically significantly larger than the traditional bets.
A superfecta is a trifecta where we also need to pick the fourth place horse correctly too. The payouts for successful superfectas are often astronomical.
A common way to make trifecta and superfecta more accessible is the idea of “boxing” the bet. A boxed trifecta means you pick three horses to win, place, and show but you do not care which horse does which! It is kind of like taking out a show bet on each of the three horses.
It can also be viewed as taking out six different trifecta bets, one for each of the six possible orders for the top three horses. A boxed superfecta is the top four horses in any order – equivalent to betting the 24 different superfecta orders. You can use this knowledge to figure out if the boxed versions of the bets are good value or not.
The last type of exotic bet we want to consider is the exacta. The exacta is an easier trifecta: you are only required to pick the top two horses in the correct order. Usually an exacta is a popular bet for casual participants because of its large payouts combined with a reasonable probability of hitting for certain races.
Different Racing Surfaces
There are three different racing surfaces: dirt, grass, and artificial. Dirt is the fastest, grass the slowest, and artificial surfaces between. Try to think of the difference between dirt and grass like the difference between running on the road versus the beach. A squishy, soft surface absorbs footsteps and makes running harder.
Because turf is the slowest, it often leads to races which are bunched up. The result is that the race often comes down to a sprint at the end. Because of this, upsets can be much more likely. After all, it is easier to win in a sprint against a favorite versus winning over the course of a long race where the true colors show through.
Knowing how to bet on horse racing requires knowing how to take the track into account. So, to summarize: dirt tracks tend to favor favorites while grass races can favor underdogs.
Horse Betting Strategies
There are countless strategies for how to bet on horse racing. And unfortunately, most of them are total nonsense. Most strategies for horse betting just make things more complicated and don’t actually increase your chance of winning.
As an example, many people use the dutch strategy to help decide how to bet on horse racing. Dutching is the process of picking multiple horses to win in any one race. Not only that, but the dutch strategy suggests betting different amounts on different horses so that the payout is the same no matter who wins.
For example, if we want to pick two horses in our dutch and one is 2:1 while the other is 3:1, then betting 150 on the favorite and 100 on the other leads to the same payout no matter who wins. This is actually very similar to what we do in arbitrage betting.
A second strategy that is common is the Yankee strategy. The Yankee strategy involves picking four horses, one in each of four different races. Then, you place bets on each pair of horses both winning (6 double bets), a bet on each set of three horses each winning (4 treble bets), and one bet on all four horses winning.
The idea behind this strategy is that 2 of the 4 picks winning is enough to profit. If more win, the profits can be quite large.
The problem with each of these strategies is that they don’t actually change your odds of winning. Usually, just betting on one horse returns a healthy profit. Most horse racing strategies found online lead to a higher probability of a small profit. It isn’t any better or worse and in the long run is worse than betting everything on the single horse you think is the most underrated.
The real way to decide how to bet on horse racing is to figure out which horse’s odds are the furthest away from truth. Of course this sounds simple, but it is the only way. Complicated betting schemes don’t help. Finding the under and overrated horses does. And, the sad thing is, you can’t find this information online because this knowledge is too valuable to share.
How to Do Your Own Research
One of my favorite ways to learn how to build sports betting models is to see what others do and see if there is a small improvement that I can make to potentially lead to a profitable model. The problem is, not a lot of people will publish their metrics and models online for fear of others stealing them.
The more people that use a strategy, the less profitable it becomes. Especially at large races, if everyone uses the same “perfect model”, then the markets will equalize because the sports betting markets may be efficient markets.
However, there is one online community where people regularly talk about model building. Kaggle is an online community of data scientists that compete to build the best models using the same data. Each competition has an associated discussion section.
If you search Kaggle for “horse racing”, you can find many discussions about how people build their models. If you want to build one for yourself, I would recommend starting there.
Basic Ideas for How to Bet on Horse Racing
This section is my “what would I do to start building a horse betting strategy?”. To me, it is all about measuring speed. My model would be based on four components:
- Measuring average speed over long distances
- Measuring top speed
- Measuring a horse’s trajectory
- Measuring the horse’s consistency
By looking at a horse’s average speed, we can get a good idea of how the horse will perform overall. By looking at a few different race distances, we should be able to get a feel for what they’re capable of at a given distance.
By looking at a horse’s top speed, we can see how to adjust a horse’s performance on shorter courses and in turf events. It can be really hard to measure sprint ability, but doing so can give crucial information.
Looking at how a horse’s performance has changed over time can give an idea of what to expect in the future. A horse who is getting faster might be a good underdog pick while a horse getting slower might be one to avoid. This is a great application of time series in sports which we studied just a few weeks back.
Finally, measuring a horse’s consistency can help us capture the unknown of the race. If a horse sometimes just doesn’t show up for whatever reason, we might want to decrease their odds.
All of these would need to be quantified and studied closely to build a horse model. And, building a profitable model might be difficult to nearly impossible. But for me, it would be a fun project. When it comes to horses, it’s all about speed.
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