The Best Horse Racing Bets Are Based on One Decision

Learn how to make one decision correctly and you will succeed at horse racing handicapping.  That’s the good news.  The bad news is that decision is not easy.  Making a profit betting on horse races is difficult, but if you learn to always answer this one question correctly before you bet, you will have more winners and a better chance of staying ahead of the game.

You may think that the most important part of making money betting on horses is to know which horse will win the race.  If you are really good at picking winners that might be true or then again, maybe not.  What really matters is if you know how often any one of the runners in a race are likely to win and then if you can convert that to what I call fair value odds.

Fair value odds are high enough to return your money.  That in itself means the horse had to be under bet and underestimated by the crowd.  The reason is that any runner that is bet at exactly the odds equivalent to its probability of winning will still not return all your money.  The reasons the takeout and breakage, on in other words, the vig. So any horse that returns your entire bet amount is already a good deal.

Going one step farther, you want a wager that returns your bet amount and a profit.  In most cases that is a wager that is seriously underestimated by the crowd.  If the horse returns all your money it was probably at least 20% under bet.  Add a profit to that and you find a wager that is 25%-30% under the true value of the bet.  That doesn’t happen very often.

Though it is a rare occurrence, that is what you really need in order to succeed at horse racing handicaping.  Therefore, to sum it up, the most important decision is if the odds on a horse are high enough to make a profit on such horses if you bet them 10 times.  For instance, if the runner is expected to win once out of ten races, then it would have to go off at 9-1 in order for you to break even.  If the horse would win one out of five, then you would have to get 4-1 odds.  That is the only decision that matters.  You must know the answer to this question.  “If I bet such a horse ten times, would I make enough to pay for all my bets with a profit?”