I very seldom make place bets-- instead I use my horse in the second postion in exactas under the horse or horses that could conceivably beat my horse even if he runs the race I'm betting him to run. How many horses I'm willing to play him under is a function of how long he is, and I would point out that if you have to play a 10-1 shot under more than 3 horses (or a 5-1 shot under more than 1) you shouldn't be playing him to begin with-- you are diluting your play to the point of negligible overlay, at best. This is why the wide spread position Friedman takes with his "picks" is ridiculous-- he does it not because it's a money maker (it's not), but because he wants it to look like he "hit" the race. If you listen to a lot of the guys who have 900#'s etc., you will find they do something similar. On our analysis we make tight plays, which are more likely to result in a total loss for the race, but will give you a much better ROI in the long run. This is also the way I play myself.

Having said that the BC Classic was a little different. My main play in the race was MDO-- he was on about 75% of my tickets.I liked Volponi to run well (the very first time I went through the pre-entries I told Alan he was the live longshot in the race), but thought he was more likely to get in the exotics than win, partly because he was spotting weight to the 3 year olds. At the price it was easy to make the win bet, but I decided to bet place rather than exactas because it was a huge field with too many possibilities (if he ran second to someone I didn't use I would have had to shoot myself), and a lot of payoffs were taxable, complicating matters. So I ended up betting 80w 120p. I also had the exacta OK, but had it much more if MDO would have won-- effectively cancelling out the win bet.



TGJB