I can only speak for what I know about the most well-known and successful of the computer teams (B. Benter/A. Woods), but I do know from what I've read and heard from the practitioners themselves that they bet as much as they can at each track, according to the formula for maximum expected value (whatever produces the maximum profit, given that larger bets drive down the odds), and they do indeed funnel a lot into the exotic pools (the more exotic the better, since their edge is multiplicative).

Here's what Bill Benter said about the subject back in May of 2003, at which point they were about 10 years into the Hong Kong market, and computer teams had started to penetrate the U.S. market:

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[i]“A report from the trenches...10 years ago we were in the golden age of horse racing. Well, the age is still golden...This year, the aggregate win of all of the horseplayers using these systems will probably be the largest it’s ever been, and I would say that it’s more or less gone up every year.

"In particular markets – Hong Kong is kind of not as good as it used to be – pool sizes have fallen there and there’s a lot of competition - but looked at worldwide as these teams expand into new markets, this just gets better and better as time goes on, so we still haven’t probably hit the peak yet of how practical these systems are. Teams are playing around the world in most of the big racing markets very successfully.[/i]
[i]
“There’s very little sign - we have talked before - ...will the public get better, and start producing better estimates? We haven’t seen much sign of it. It seems that basically, the probability estimates set by the public are not much better than they were, and computer models still seem to be able to outperform the public by the same large margin. Competing teams – that is people using computer systems in the same markets definitely hurt, but life goes on. Everybody still seems to win, even when you have two or three teams going head to head, betting on the same horses, driving down the odds on the same horses, everybody still keeps winning somehow."[/i]
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He also said at another conference that he doesn't bet everything at the last minute. He often disguises his bets by betting at different times throughout the betting period leading up to post time, and often even on other horses, to throw the other computer teams off his trail.


Rocky R