FAVORITES

[pic6vic]

The last 6 races on Monday and the first 2 races today at Hollywood, the chalk has won every race.

[ranchwest]

Where were the "value plays"?

[karlskorner]

A"good" handicapper 'knows' when "chalk" is going to win. You should have bet them

Karl

[ranchwest]

I thought maybe the "value players" would jump right in with a thousand posts in this thread.

Sometimes chalk is all there is. It is OK to win money on the winner, regardless of the price.

[karlskorner]

Ranchwest;

The "value players" jumped all over my post on "value" a couple of months back, 1675 replies.

Yours " Sometimes chalk is all there is. It's OK to win money on the winner, regardless of price"

I hope you didn't read that in a book, but learned it the hard way as I did.

Karl

[ranchwest]

Originally posted by karlskorner
Ranchwest;

The "value players" jumped all over my post on "value" a couple of months back, 1675 replies.

Yours " Sometimes chalk is all there is. It's OK to win money on the winner, regardless of price"

I hope you didn't read that in a book, but learned it the hard way as I did.

Karl

Well, I've been doing this for 30 years.

Sometimes chalk is not worth a second look. Sometimes it is what I call "money on the ground" -- most people are getting it, if you don't, it is your loss. Learning the difference is what has improved my ROI.

[Rick]

Good chalk is hard to find but it does exist. However, good morning line oddsmakers cause a lot of winning chalk horses that are not quite good enough to bet. You like it, he likes it, and the public likes it and it wins a high percentage of the time. It does a lot better than the average but still loses a little bit. These are the kind of races with no overlays on win bets. My advice is to look for exactas. Almost every race has at least one bet in it that's an overlay, but you may have to look at more than one pool. Now, if it's a 2 or 3 horse race, maybe that's not usually true, but I have found some notable exceptions, especially in 3 horse races. As to races with mostly first-time-starters, don't throw those out. There are situations where you can bet ANY horse that has previously started!

[Lefty]

I never could win with chalk. Oh, I can win races but not money. You CAN go broke betting winners when they don't win their fair share and this is deja vu all over again.

[rrbauer]

"Value" in horse-race betting involves two components.

1. Chance of winning.

2. The payoff when you win.

You can have 4/5 shots be overlays and you can have 45-1 shots be underlays. It's a function of their respective chances of winning versus the rest of the field.

There are times, when the game is "easy", that you have to accept a low price...or, not play.

[karlskorner]

I have to agree with rrbauer "there are times you have to accept a low price, or not play at all". I walk into the track with intent to play 7-10 of the races on the card for the simple reason that this is my livelihood. My purpose for being there is to walk out with more money than I came in with. Monday at CRC there were 9 races, I had intent to play 7 (2 were off the grass) 5 of the races paid in the neighborhood of 3/5-4/5, I played them because I believed the horse would win, I lost 1 race and the other I won and it paid $16.40, I went home with $404.00 more than I came in with. If you have done your homework, price does not matter.
Most on this board would scoff at the low prices and not play the race, I cannot afford to.

Karl

[cj]

Originally posted by rrbauer
"Value" in horse-race betting involves two components.

1. Chance of winning.

2. The payoff when you win.

You can have 4/5 shots be overlays and you can have 45-1 shots be underlays. It's a function of their respective chances of winning versus the rest of the field.

There are times, when the game is "easy", that you have to accept a low price...or, not play.

4-5 overlay : Congaree on Monday
45-1 underlay : Ocean Sound in the Derby

CJ

[rrbauer]

With CJ around, I can rest my case!

:)

[cj]

LOL...its easy to pick them out AFTER they run, don't ask me before the race. I would have said Magic Weisner was an underlay at 45-1 also. Of course, he didn't win, so maybe he was!

CJ

[ranchwest]

I usually find about 3 plays a day. I don't have time to find out about odds, value, biases, shoes, wraps, key races, trainer patterns, etc. I don't knock those who have had so much success with those things, I just have to find other ways.

I pick a horse and play it. I make a profit. Most of my plays are favorites. I'm just very selective and go for horses that I believe will win and they do often enough to return a profit.

There's more than one way to handicap and win. If we all liked the same horse, we wouldn't be doing this very long.

[Dick Schmidt]

Ranchwest,

My style is about as opposite from yours as possible and still be in the same sport, but you are absolutely correct when you say:

"There's more than one way to handicap and win. If we all liked the same horse, we wouldn't be doing this very long."

You aren't wrong, I'm not right. We're just different. Is that so bad? Keep doing what works for you.

Dick

[Rick]

You can win without prior knowledge of the odds if your method is contrarian in nature. If that's the case, then when the horse is bet down you just have a better chance of winning but the edge is still there. I've played both ways. When I was in Nevada with limited time to handicap, I played nothing but systems without knowing the odds in advance. The best of them won approximately the same amount in all odds ranges. Sometimes now, I'll just buy a racing form and play all of the races just looking for the horse with the most underrated factors in each race. With a big enough bag of tricks to draw on, it's possible to show a small profit using that approach alone.

[alyingthief]

i will give you some facts that cost me time and money to determine: hollywood's summer meet is notorious for chalk. i did a study that looked at four years of data: the races i examined were races on dirt, 16k and up, short and long: the favorite won at ~40%, and the winner came from the top three public odds over 84% of the time.

here's the money maker: when the favorite is a candidate for a BOUNCE, he WILL bounce, and is a false favorite. you can make money betting this angle, though you have to measure the 2nd and 3rd choices carefully (you can bet them both blindly and make a profit, but there are better profits if you give a look at all the horses in the field). additionally, there is a slight profit to be obtained by betting the favorite to place when he does not appear to be a bounce candidate, if one is judicious about evaluating the pools. however, check it out, i have not bothered with hollywood for the past two seasons, so the management of the churchill team may have altered things somewhat.

10k, 12.5k, maiden claiming, and msw (look at first time starters--i blindly bet all first time starters in mc there one summer and made a flat bet profit) are a source of long priced horses, and the turf races, too, are competitive--and this is the key, the so-called playable races are not competitive.

5,000

[Sekrah]

$1 trifecta payouts in those last 6 races on Monday that the favorite won.

$32.00
$11.90
$206.70
$513.10
$35.00
$304.40


There's other way to bet races besides value win bets... Average tri of $183 with favorites winning?

I don't mind that. Of course it requires you to pick 2nd and 3rd, but thats what handicapping is all about.. If you don't see the favorite losing, and you dont want to ride money on the chalk, look for value exotics, key the low price, and laugh all the way to the window.