Horse Betting Net

The fundamental principles behind successful horse racing betting are the same as those behind NFL betting and behind any other sports betting genre for that matter. Stick with the crowds and bet the favorites and you’ll end up losing money in the long run. In order to make money you need something called the “hidden value”. The hidden value can be defined as the difference between the real odds that a team or a horse should carry, and the odds offered by the bookmaker which are often more advantageous for the bettor than the real ones.

The bookmaker doesn’t offer these odds because he’s stupid…far from it: he does because the circumstances force him to. The circumstances are influenced by several factors, among which the betting public is probably the most important.

In horse racing, betting the favorite is easy as 1-2-3. All you need to do is to pay attention to the tote board and pick the horse with the best odds at post time. Everyone can do that, but if that’s the street you choose to go down, you should be aware that you’ll only get it right about 33% of the time. 66% of the time you’ll get it wrong and because of the way the odds are structured, you’ll end up in the red.

On top of all that, simply picking a winner on horse racing is not enough. You need to pick a winner which pays more than it’s supposed to pay. To spot the overlay, you need to understand that processes that go on behind the scenes and that contribute to the odds displayed at post time.

As I said, one of the forces which have the biggest influence on tote board odds, is the betting public. The public however, is in turn influenced by the morning line-makers and the public handicappers (many of whom can only be called scamdicappers).

The morning line makers are newspaper people, race trackers, race office employees etc. These guys are tasked with the chore of elaborating odds for the horses involved, up to 48 hours before the race. On top of the fact that most of these guys are not exactly keen on providing accurate odds, it is humanly impossible to take all the late changes, scratches and workouts into consideration when creating these odds.

If the morning line comes from a race track employee, it is distorted for other reasons as well: horses that should be listed 99-1 are never listed that way out of respect for the owner, jockey etc. Such horses are routinely listed at 30-1.The public handicapper is the next link in the chain-reaction. Many of these guys work for newspapers too, or run their own online handicapping operations. They too base their odds on the morning lines, though some of them use inside scoop that they or their employees pick up from jockeys, horse owners, grooms, trainers etc… The problem with these inside tips is that they’re almost always wrong. Those who let these tips fly usually make their assumptions based on a small part of the picture. They only look at the horse they train or own, and fail to take the competition into consideration. On top of it all, the information they provide is subjective, as you’ll rarely find an owner or a jockey to berate his own horse.

Based on such shaky pieces of information, the public handicapping lines are obviously short of the mark most of the time. The betting public places its bets based on a comparison of the morning lines, public handicapping advice and tote board, post time odds. This is how someone who would never have considered posting any money on a 99-1 horse ends up betting on it, especially so if a public handicapper considers the horse will finish in the money.

The general public is the one that amplifies the errors which slip into the equation during the elaboration of the morning lines and public handicapping. When it comes to betting, make sure you never go with the crowd and always aim to find the hidden value which will be induced by all the various factors described above.

When you play poker, make sure you never play a hand without rakeback. Take the absolute poker rakeback for instance: it offers you a 30% rake rebate. The Full Tilt poker rakeback is a much popular deal though, despite the only 27% rebate it offers.’