For horse players who like single taking race exotics such as exactas, trifectas and quartets, the skill of eliminating horses is almost as valuable as choosing which horses to include.
Percentage betting makes it cheap to add runners. That can lead to lazy handicapping and fearfully spreading too wide of a net.
Narrowing down the contention reduces the cost of the bet and enables winning punters to catch it more times within their budget.
In a 13- horse field, there are 1 716 possible outcomes to the trifecta and 17 160 combinations in the quartet. By eliminating four horses as having little chance of making the frame, the number of possible combinations drops markedly.
There are now just 504 outcomes to the trifecta and 3024 possible results in the quartet. Refining the wager by leaning on a banker or roving banker/s brings costs down even more sharply.
Sure, there is the chance that one of the throw outs hits the board and scuppers your bet. What happens in the lower slots is often a function of racing “chaos” and is genuinely hard to predict.
However, in the long term, it pays to reduce the number of horses on your ticket and improve the return on investment.
Eliminating horses is a form of anti-handicapping. Typically, we are conditioned to make positive cases for horses, however marginal and spurious. It’s human nature to be reluctant to pitch horses off tickets and many players take the field in the lower slots of trifectas and quartets as a reflex action hoping a crazy horse boost dividends.
That’s partly because it’s indeed difficult to decree that a horse cannot hit the placings. Nearly every horse has something positive, or a redeeming virtue, in it’s favour.
The niggling concern is that a horse mistakenly left out will stagger into third or fourth and wreck the bet. “How could you leave it out? “ fellow punters will heckle, pointing to some esoteric factor which gave the horse in question hope of staggering into fourth spot.
Yet, kicking horses into touch is the gamble that bettors’’ should try taking. Spreading too wide leads to overspending relative to the possible return. Realize too, if the wide net tactic is used by most punters, then dividends come down, which can be damaging to the bottom line over time.
Being more aggressive in the single race exotics by taking leaner combinations will lead to more losing bets. That’s the stark reality.
Wagering is very much an individual preference and people have varying styles, budgets, and capacity for risk. So, making “rules” and advising general prescriptions is somewhat misguided.
However, it can be acknowledged that there is a sound argument for really making it count when calling it right by building the bet around fewer horses - and winning more times for a smaller outlay. And, by constraining costs, less goes in the losing column when wrong.
A strategy which is, at least, worth considering…
Bio: Mark van Deventer has been refining his speed figures for thoroughbred racehorses over three decades. A full-time racing journalist since 2013, he’s known for his integrity and imaginative handicapping, adapting the principles of Andrew Beyer’s figures to South African racecourses.
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