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[MJC922]

IMO looking at it in a common sense way there probably isn't more than one significant overlay per 8 horse field with a 17% takeout in play. There may consistently be one significant overlay (by that I mean like 50% over fair value) and one smaller overlay (maybe 10%) with the latter being close to break even anyway in real world testing because with two long-term accurate lines butting heads they're surely going to meet somewhere in-between which is probably why even Benter used fractional Kelly. Someone correct me if I'm wrong there.

So you have those variables to juggle, number of overlays per race, going to be impacted by field size, takeout and how overbet the favorite might be. In cases of a severely overbet favorite in theory if it exceeds the takeout everyone else in the race could be dutched (even in a small field) but how often is the favorite that much out of line?

An example, 40% of the pool = even money on the tote after the takeout. You could dutch everyone else in the race if you believed that horse should only have 23% of the money bet on it. Sadly even at that way out of line number you would still need to be 100% 'right' about the 23% to make 1 or 2% dutching everyone else against the favorite. Instead of everyone against, you might find 3 or 4 that are the most value. Aside from huge fields I can't see any other scenario where you can dig out 4 horses for a dutch when takeouts are that high. I would be interested in others opinions on this, maybe I'm not looking at it the right way...

It's cool to contemplate dutching as a strategy but I think it's doubtful that it happens very often in the US game where you can get away with dutching more than two. I dutched two horses on a somewhat regular basis when I bet full time but I also never tracked those results separately, all of my tracking was done total invested vs total return on a race and then logged the total for the day in a notebook when I got home. You were a rare bird to even track that much in those days. A buddy of mine would snicker at me when the race was over and I'd write something like 'I 20' 'R 0' 'N -20' / +80 at the top edge of the program for each race.

Anyway it wouldn't surprise me if I lost a lot of money on those occasional dutch bets but they were typically action bets anyway. Whatever it took stay sane from one day to the next was the intent with those.