Dear BitPlayer,

Thank you for the compliment. I wish I could tell you that there was sophisticated data backing up what I am telling you. Unfortunately, I am not aware of any. I can tell you the following about my observations....First, I believe Beyer may have written about this in one of his books long ago. Second, I use to notice when SoCal had very big fields that quite often a favorite would win and some long horse would come in underneath and the payoffs would seem quite generous to me. Again, I do not have anything empirical to offer you, but I can tell you that it has worked and produced some very pleasing results. Before the days of internet betting, I would read the charts everyday and think about whether a payoff was one I would want or not (really whether I was sorry I missed the day or not). If you just compare exotic payoffs to win odds, you come across some situations where the exotics seem absurdly generous and when they seem really stingy. I have tried to figure out when those are. The best I can tell you is that you need a big field. I think this is necessary because there are more combinations and the burden of the take on each combination is less than it is in smaller fields. Also, it perversely seems to come up when the favorite in question is very heavily bet (I would say 8-5 or lower).

If you think about it, a horse should have the same amount bet on it to win place and show because it should have the same relative chances for all three of those bets. However, when you bet a horse to come in second or come in third in an exotic, you are actually betting AGAINST that horse to win. In other words, a horse that has a lot bet on it to finish first in an exotic should have very little bet on it to finish in another postion because the big money on it in the first position is saying that this horse will not finish second. This is especially true with the heavy favorites because the crowd is basically saying these guys are really going to win. Nevertheless, a lot of people box and do things that result in these horses getting a lot of money in these other positions even if it is not logical. That puts some money out there to win for the person willing to take a position. The problem is that you need to have some real confidence to be able to take such a position because as we all know races are often so closely matched that the best horse can run second or third for a plethora of reasons. You need to find the times when the horse is so good that that normal level of uncertainty seems quite a bit lessened.

I do not try to force these plays. You really need some pre-conditions before it makes any sense. Having the big field is key. Also, the horse needs to be a very big favorite. If the horse is 5-2 or 3-1 as a favorite and you have a lot of confidence, you are much better off just betting to win. One reason is that this is not such a heavy favorite that it is illogical to think it might run second and the money bet in the lower positions is not as ripe for the picking on a basis of pure logic; another is that winning the race is not enough, you need to get a price horse underneath. I lose these bets sometimes when the favorite wins because I cannot get a price horse up. I do not want to be missing 5-2 or 3-1 on the clear winner that I was confident in in these cases (I kick myself and wonder why I didn't just make the big bet to win). However, I am not going to lose any sleep over missing a 6-5 or 7-5 win price. Sometimes, you have the overwhelming favorite, but there is no reason to be suspect of the other horses that are bet. In those situations you cannot do this play because people really seem to overbet the exotics with the logical contenders running in (again, I cannot give you evidence backing this up, it is my observation). So, in addition to the overwhelming favorite, you need some horses that can come in at big prices and some horses that can run out at low prices. These are really the important pre-conditions. So, you have to be really careful not to force this play because if you do not have the preconditions, you do not have the generous potential that causes the bet to make sense. One thing I might add is that you probably want to make sure you are covering with the lower priced horses. For example, this principle works if the odds in the super are 6-5,7-2,50-1,4-1. You do not want to lose out on the good payoff because you needlessly threw out the low horses but were right about the 50-1 shot. So you need to do the ticket by keying some long prices and using lots of horses in the other spots.

Now, you are taking risk in filling out the bottom of the ticket of course, but your payoff seems to be overly enhanced because of all the money that was lost by the people who put the favorite in the second through 4th position.

I feel like I havent really given you what you are looking for (hard and fast support to back up what I am saying), and I apologize for that. I can only tell you that it is my observation and I have been pleased with the results.

SCM2