How are horses odds determined

[ilzho]

Hello:

What determines a horse's odds in a particular race?
Is it their pedigree, the trainer, jockey, workout results or race results???

I assume there is no easy answer, but would like to hear what everyone thinks.

Thanks

[Overlay]

I assume that you're asking about what factors go into an individual bettor's assessment of a horse's winning chances. Is that correct? (If instead you mean how are each horse's toteboard odds determined, they reflect the proportion of the money in the net win pool that has been wagered on each horse, after the track's prescribed "take" percentage, as well as the appropriate "breakage" percentage (as a result of rounding payoffs down to the nearest multiple of either ten or twenty cents), have been deducted "off the top" of the total win pool.)

By contrast, there is no hard and fast procedure for individuals to arrive at a personal opinion as to what each horse's actual winning chances (i.e., its "fair odds") are . There are as many ways of approaching it as the number of people who are betting on any given race (although some means of doing so would be more reliable than others).

(And, of course, some people are also concerned only with finding and betting the one horse that they believe is likeliest to win a given race, regardless of what the horse's toteboard odds (as established by the cumulative betting public) might be.)

[ilzho]

I'm always curious to know how horses that have a tote board odds of 15 to 1 or greater win a race.
What was missed by the majority of the bettors?
I realize there is no correct/one answer to this.

[whodoyoulike]

Are you new to horse racing?

If not, I'd also like to know.

[ilzho]

I'm not new to horse racing, but I'm just a fan and casual bettor.
I don't get too deep in all of the stats.
I can do better sometimes by just picking a number or looking at the horse the day of the race, but I don't bet my paycheck either, hahaha.
I love the sport.

[whodoyoulike]

May I make a suggestion?

Search this site for a thread which had "Trainer's Edge" in the title. Or, search YouTube for the same title and add "horse racing". The video is about 90 minutes maybe longer. Since, you're a casual horseplayer it may suit your style of play. But, it's not a substitute for learning how to handicap using the pp's.

Good luck and hope you have fun. A warning though, you'll soon have a 1000 posts whether you wanted to or not.

Or, you might consider starting a thread that you're a newcomer to handicapping but, search for one before you decide.

[Overlay]

As a general rule, the cumulative assessment of horses' odds by the betting public is remarkably accurate.

When the public underestimates a horse's chances of winning, and the horse comes in first at high odds, it may be due to random events connected with the running of the race that nobody foresaw (or perhaps even could have foreseen) or could control; or to information that was not available to the general public indicating that one or more horses in a race were better (or worse) than they appeared to be from their records; or to the betting public making an error by either ignoring, overvaluing, or undervaluing information that is available to everyone; or (as I mentioned previously) to bettors becoming overly focused on finding the one horse that they perceive as having the best chance to win a race and betting it at any odds, while treating all the other horses in the race as if they had no chance at all of winning.

(And, of course, under pari-mutuel wagering, if one horse is overbet (for whatever reason) it has the effect of raising the odds on every other horse in the race (even horses that do not deserve to be at such high odds based on their records).)

I'd say that how a horse compares to its competition in either speed or pace (however that might be measured by each individual bettor) is probably the single most influential factor in betting decisions.