I think your questions regarding betting strategy are important, but as I see it there are very few general guidelines, & most of them do not apply to the BC. However, it was still interesting to learn, courtesy of Equidaily, that there are 2 mechanical approaches which have produced a significant flat bet BC profit over the last 5 yrs. The 1st(30%roi) was making a bet on every horse in every BC race. The 2nd(80%roi) was making a bet on every horse that went off at odds of 20-1 or higher.

BC or not, I think it always makes some sense to look at the card as a whole, which on Sat lead me to think that I could make enough money from a win bet on Jerry "King of undercard stakes on big race day" Hollendorfer's horse in the 1st. Good thing I wasn't at a track where on course bookmakers offer a price on who won the photo. That race, together with the next 2, completely drained my off course acct, which is why I ended up in line. I had also reached the conclusion that at anything close to the ML, Cole Norman's horse, which you surprisingly are the only one to mention, was the best win bet of the day, & would either bail me out or take things to a higher level, so to speak, depending on how things went in the prior races. As the insightful OPM recently reminded me, intervening events & one's psyche can have a profound effect on one's betting strategy. If I had pitched a shut out to that point, easy enough to do on BC day, it would have been very difficult if not impossible to make the kind of bet I thought the horse deserved. That luckily wasn't the case, but what did give me pause & caused me to cut my bet considerably was the possibility that the BC detention & testing protocol applied to the race. I take it from JB's post that it did not, something I wish I would have known beforehand. Of course, when considering "can't possibly handle firm turf HC, it would have been nice to know, as trainer Cerin put it in a TVG interview yesterday, that track maintenance had spent 2 days softening the turf course to "appease" the Euros.

For non BC days, I agree with the other two basic guidelines you hear & read most often. The 1st, much easier said than done, is to construct your plays so that they actually reflect your handicapping opinion. Hence, absent info on how you view a particular race, it's impossible to answer the specific questions you ask. But you might want to consider whether you should even consider anyone else's opinion because of guideline no 2, which is that your betting strategy won't work unless it fits your personality & approach to the game. I wouldn't recommend that someone who needs frequent positive feedback adopt my everyday definition of "spreading", which might consist of playing an 80%-20% exacta "box." In other words, how you bet the races to a certain extent depends on why you bet the races, a fundamental & difficult to answer question that many handicappers don't seem to have ever contemplated.