JC / Railbird

Betting Archive

Shut Out

– Fleetheart wins, pays $4.80. I make nothing. My online betting service is an AmericaTab outlet and I’m shut out of Southern California and New York, the two circuits I play with any seriousness, thanks to the TrackNet-ADW mess, until — like a lot of other players — I go through the bother of opening and funding a second acount. So, all I could do last night was admire how the four-year-old filly dueled for the early lead and then rebuffed a game Lochinvar’s Gold in the stretch to win by half a length, and console myself with the thought that I really didn’t want to play a 7-5 shot, even one who looked as much like a sure thing as she did.
– The champ is back! In his first work since winning the Dubai World Cup, Invasor breezed four furlongs at Belmont on Wednesday morning (NYRA). Invasor is scheduled to start next in the Suburban on June 30.

Posted in Betting on May 10, 2007

Polytrack Unfair, Punters Claim

Trainers, owners, and jockeys have lots of praise for Polytrack, but British horseplayers are less than happy with race results on the synthetic surface:

“The reputation of Polytrack is tremendously high with racing professionals,” says Mordin, “and you can see why — it reduces abandonments and increases betting turnover — but it erodes the main difference between horserace betting and all other forms of gambling, which is that you can hope to make a profit through the use of skill. Races are harder to predict and are unquestionably more competitive. When you’re betting on a horse, you hope that it has a significant edge. Polytrack denies you that.”

Seems that since Polytrack was installed at the first British racecourse four years ago, the percentage of favorites at that track winning races has dropped from 36% to 30% and that of horses with odds greater than 10-1 winning has increased from 19% to 23%, which apparently has reduced wagering “to the level of a lottery, almost.” It’s that “almost” that kills the complaint. I haven’t played Turfway, which is the only American track with the surface, but my understanding of Polytrack is that it eliminates track biases, allowing horses with different running styles to win. That’s the kind of change that would seem to make handicapping and betting a lot more interesting — which is exactly what the numbers cited above suggests, as does the 82.5% increase in handle that Turfway has seen since January 1 — if horseplayers are willing to change their approaches to handicapping.

Anyone who plays California regularly will have to adjust to synthetics starting in 2008. The state racing board passed a motion a few weeks ago mandating the state’s racetracks install Polytrack or another synthetic surface by the end of 2007, which has Andrew Beyer fretting about “uniformity”:

If the Polytrack advocates prevail, and all racetracks are basically the same, the game will lose many of its subtleties …

Beyer is specifically concerned that California tracks, “the only place in the racing world where horses regularly speed a half-mile in :44 flat or faster and keep running,” will lose their distinctive speed-favoring qualities. Patrick of Pulling Hair and Betting Horses posted a pretty good response to Beyer’s worry: “The surface is fair … that means good speed will still kill in racing, and cheap speed will set up for stalkers, and ludicrous speed will be used on ships in Spaceballs and set up for closers.”

More: Jennie Rees reports that all running styles are faring well on the surface, with speedy front-runners still winning a good percentage of races:

Turfway has been charting the running styles of winners since Jan. 1. Elliston said statistics show races being won by 42.6 percent front-runners (horses never farther back than second or a length off the lead), 22.7 percent stalkers (never farther back than fourth or four lengths), 10.1 percent midpack horses (never farther back than sixth or seven lengths) and 24.6 percent deep closers (back of sixth and at least eight lengths back early).

Posted in Betting on February 28, 2006

When the Board Talks

I read Brad Free’s column on tote board action earlier this week with much interest. The concept of smart money is ridiculous, he argues. Yet, “It is downright stubborn … to ignore unusual betting action without considering the possibility the action is meaningful” (Daily Racing Form — sub. req.). True. But what I’m wondering about, and what Free doesn’t really address, is how do bettors determine if the action is meaningful? The answer, I suspect, lies in the pattern of odds action.
I can think of three races in the past year where I observed truly unusual odds action that ended up pointing to the winner, and in each case, I dithered over whether what I was seeing was significant and whether I should incorporate it into any bets I made (I didn’t, to my regret). But I can also remember races where actual odds differed from the morning line in a way that indicated the “possible existence of factors not previously considered” and ended up pointing to nothing.
The difference lay in how the odds action played out: What was noticeable in the three races I recall with unusual action that was not apparent in the odds action of other races is that in each of those three races, the odds changes were sustained and balanced.
In last year’s MassCap, for example, Offlee Wild had a morning line value of 15-1, which he opened at. With the next flash of the board, his odds plunged to 6-5, and then stabilized at 3-1, which is where they remained until post time. Funny Cide, expected to be the overwhelming favorite at 8-5, drifted up to 2-1 — which might not seem significant, except that the MassCap crowd was made up of many casual fans who intended to bet Funny Cide regardless of any other factors. Neither horses’ odds fluctuated greatly after their new values were set, and the odds of other horses on the board hewed pretty close to the morning line. It was an instance of meaningful action on the tote board. And for anyone paying attention, it was a chance to cash a ticket.

Posted in Betting on March 31, 2005