> JTC -
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> How is the book?

I went to the DRF site to buy Jim Mazur's Trainer detail books for the upcoming Del Mar meet. I saw Crist's EXOTIC BETTING book hawked there too, and I said: "What the heck. Toilet reading. Let's throw that one in the cart too! Let's see what Crist has to say about my favorite wager, the superfecta."

I think what he's done is very worthwhile. Thumbs up. It's not a picking-winners handicapping book. Since any knucklehead can pick a winner, and the real key to profiting at the races is betting well, the subject matter is certainly worthwhile. Yes, he covers topics we all may already know about. But it can be good to get his approach on a lot of things and see specifically how, for example, he lays out his Pick-6 tickets. My only nitpick would be that I found his discussion of the superfecta lacking. Telling us that a popular way to play the super is to consider it a combo of a win selection and a trifecta... well, that's nice, but I thought he could have gotten more sophisticated about it beyond the obvious. For example, in my opinion only, that four-tiered bet essentially needs TWO keys: The top winning-tier horse[s] who can win the race; and an UNDERKEY horse who will NOT win, but WILL finish 2nd, 3rd or 4th [because he'll have to go wide, is not fast enough, is from a low-percentage trainer that never gets the job done, or whatever].

In my opinion, the best writing about horse race betting is in Chapter 8, MODERN BETTING STRATEGY in Andy Beyer's book THE WINNING HORSEPLAYER, wherein he talks about "constructing a situation" [of bets] around several reasonable outcomes of a race. But to each, his own.