Speedkills,

I agree that horseracing bad beats are much rarer than poker bad beats. Personally, I have only suffered five bad beats worth remembering in 29 years of betting horses (a once in five year strike rate).

In poker, I see bad beats all the time. Last month, I lost three times in one night with pocket pairs higher than another pocket pair (twice I had AA to QQ and once I had QQ to 99). All three times we were all in before the flop. All three times the lower pair tripped up. We all know that a higher pair is a prohibitive favorite over a lower pair, but that tripping up happens. For it to happen three times consecutively is a longshot but within the realm of consideration. One should definitely see such things if one plays enough.

Maybe the frequency of the bad beats should indicate that it is the expectations that are bad and not the beats.

While I will not go into my two worst bad beats (which were colossal), I will lay one memorable bad beat out for consideration and you consider how this compares to poker (I might have had myself to blame, and I certainly learned a lesson). I was betting a track I hadn't bet in years one night. It had been quite a busy day, and I wasn't able to as thoroughly scour information on the track as I would like to have. I noticed early on that the pick threes seemed to be very generous compared to the win prices of the horses (although there were no particularly long horses -- the pick three just seemed to offer unusual value), so I decided to concentrate my action on shotgunning pick threes. In one pick three with fields of more than 10 horses for all three races, I noticed that the races were particularly wide open, and I made my ticket wide open. I bet a $210 ticket (7X6X5X$1). Sure enough, long price horses came in all three legs -- $34, $98, and $46. The $1 win parlay would have paid $19,159 (and the parlay would have had a much more significant mutuel take withdrawn from it because the win take is performed three times as opposed to the one take in the pick three), guess what my ticket was worth! A mere $2,500. I just barely cleared 10-1 for hitting one of my best outcomes. What happened? I was not aware that the pools for the pick three at this track were tiny (and there was no way to get this information as there were no results for this track in the racing form and they did not post pool size). I had actually taken home the entire pool. My bet was more than 5% of the entire pool. I have now learned my lesson and am very careful about watching the size of pools before making my exotic bets, but this was an expensive lesson. How often can you expect to hit a bet like that? If I had made the bet in NY or California, I would have had a very nice score. As it turned out, my result for the night was ordinary. Again, maybe I was to blame in this situation, but it just shows that as a horseplayer, you face bad luck from a lot of unexpected sources. It also shows that bad beats are not things that happen a bunch of times in one year. They are watershed events in your gambling life. My two toughest bad beats are painful to recount.