Double Your Chances of Making a Profit At the Horse Races With …

If you are one of the many people who are handicapping horse races and trying to make a profit, you would probably like to be able to double your profit without too much work.  The easiest way to do that is right under your nose. Before we discuss how to increase your profit, or perhaps to start actually making a profit, let’s talk about your record keeping.

Most of us don’t like the arduous task of keeping records, especially when we are playing the ponies.  For one thing, it takes a lot of fun out of it and secondly, it is a lot of tedious work.  This is where you have to make a decision. Are you a recreational horse player who just wants to wager on races and have some fun, or are you a serious horse player who wants to make a profit?  If you are doing it just for fun, then set aside an amount of money you can afford to lose and have a ball.

On the other hand, if you are trying to make it pay, you’d better keep track of the money.  Picking winners is fun, but finding good bets is how you actually succeed at horse racing handicapping. How will you know whether you’re doing a good job of it if you don’t know which bets that you make are profitable and which ones are losers?  Being able to eliminate bets that don’t show a profit is one quick way to increase your r.o.i., return on investment.

Now here is another way to increase profits dramatically and it only takes a few minutes.  First of all, find out how much each bet costs.  I don’t mean the amount that you risk, but rather the amount the track takes out of the pool.  The percentage of takeout, or vig as it is sometimes called, varies from track to track and state to state.  Paying over 20% at one track and around 15% at another can have a big impact.

Let’s say you make a profit of 10% and you’re playing at a track that charges 21% on the bets you make, moving your action to a track that charges 15% increases your results by 5%, which just happens to be a 50% increase in your profit.  That’s right, just by playing at a different track you may actually be able to increase your profit. 

You will also be voting for a lower takeout with your money.  If enough horse players do that and handles change according to the takeout, state lawmakers who set those figures will start to pay attention and start treating us as consumers and customers rather than thinking of us as sheep who can be easily led and who will accept whatever is given to us.