Winning bets on greyhound racing
winning bets
In the modern world of greyhound racing, gamblers have been forced to play exotic bets to get a reasonable return on their biggest investments. When you compare the $100,000+ prize pools of Thoroughbred racing with the anemic sub-$1,000 greyhound racing funds, the reason becomes clear. To get any value in the sport of greyhound racing, you have to play exotic pools.
I play horses and puppies. I play both sports in completely different ways. What works in horse racing will not work in greyhound racing. It requires two completely different skill sets. When asked which one I prefer, my answer is always horse racing. It only makes sense if you think about it. When I play horses, I simply look for likely winners and then see if playing that horse to win will be profitable for me. In greyhound racing I have to find a winner and then assess 7 other contenders to run with my key winner. I also have to analyze how many combinations I can play to have a chance of winning while keeping those combinations small enough for my bet to be profitable. I’ve always liked a good challenge, but given the choice, I’d rather play a greyhound to win. With the prospect of better win pools to play hopefully in the near future, I decided to visit this facility and discuss the things involved in becoming profitable with this form of play.
Disability
The first step is the downside, obviously. In my opinion, I would only be doing you a disservice by trying to summarize how to disable greyhounds in this short article. That’s why I created an online greyhound university to teach. It takes training, time and effort to be good at handicap. It’s certainly not something I can teach in this short article. But I can give you some tips and how to apply them to play win pools.
Speed, class, initial speed and form are the main fundamentals of greyhound handicap. Those are the basics. Beyond that, it is an opportunity. That would be the set-up of the race that you are analyzing. Neither of those factors means much if a greyhound is in a race that presents conditions that will give it a remote chance of winning. There is a lot of information online that you can google and read for free on the subject of velocity, class, initial velocity, and shape. Using that information, you will develop your handicap method.
Once you have a method, you need to determine how accurate it is. In today’s world of online data, it’s much easier to collect results and see how your picks are performing. You need to play on paper and compile results and statistics to know how good you are at picking winners. Most handicappers find that they perform better in some races than others. Some players specialize in Maiden races, or road races, etc. Know what your strengths are and what your average winning percentage is.
value bets
Once you have a handicap method, your role as a player becomes simple. You want to bet your selections profitably. Below is a fictional example of how this could be achieved.
Let’s say you’ve determined that you can pick the winner in Maiden sprints about 40% of the time. You also know that your second pick wins about 25% of the time. You could even go further if you have the records to back it up and say that your third pick wins 15% of the time. To participate in Maiden races for profit, you simply need to place bets that will generate long-term profit. Remember that it is never about whether you win or lose a specific race. It’s all about playing a large number of races and winning more on the tickets collected than you originally wagered. This is why record keeping is so important.
In the example above, we’ll assume your top 3 picks are 1, 2, and 8. A paper with your winning percentages would look like this
1 – 40%
2 – 25%
8 – 15%
What does that mean translated into quotas? You will need to know this to make good decisions.
40% winners means that the actual odds of the dog winning are 1 in 2.5 or 1.5/1 against. 1.5/1 in total board odds is expressed as 3/2.
If you don’t have a good understanding of odds vs. win percentage, here’s a chart to help you out.
Odds of Winning – % Win
1/10 – 90.91
1/5 – 83.33
2/5 – 71.42
1/2 – 66.67
3/5 – 62.50
4/5 – 55.56
1/1 – 50.00
6/5 – 45.45
7/5 – 41.67
3/2 – 40.00
8/5 – 38.46
9/5 – 35.71
2/1 – 33.33
5/2 – 28.57
3/1 – 25.00
7/2 – 22.22
4/1 – 20.00
9/2 – 18.19
5/1 – 16.67
6/1 – 14.29
7/1 – 12.50
8/1 – 11.11
9/1 – 10.00
10/1 – 9.09
11/1 – 8.33
1/12 – 7.69
1/15 – 6.25
1/20 – 4.76
1/25 – 3.85
1/30 – 3.23
50/1 – 1.96
99/1 – 1.00
Don’t let math, decimals and percentages scare you. With a little time you will become familiar with it. I like to use easy examples to get people started. Once you grasp the easy ones, it helps you understand them all. We all tend to be more comfortable with dozens. It is the foundation that the dollar is built on, and we are generally more comfortable with it.
If a dog has a 10% chance of winning, then it has a 1 in 10 chance. If you divide 100 by 10, you get 10. So there are 10 blocks, and our dog has ONE of them. So 10% is a 1 in 10 chance of winning.
Now the odds are represented as ODDS AGAINST. So if a dog has a 1 in 10 chance of winning, the odds AGAINST him are 9 to 1. This is commonly represented as 9/1 or the odds you normally see on a board.
To be profitable, if you know a dog’s winning odds, all you have to do is get the profit pool to pay you MORE than those odds. It’s quite simple actually.
Let’s go back to our example
1 – 40% 3/2 odds
2 – 25% 3/1 odds
8 – 15% 6/1 odds
So we would handicap the race and be ready to play long before post time. It’s as simple as comparing the odds the crowd gives you to the odds of winning for the greyhounds.
Let’s say there is 1 minute left to bet that the 1 dog has a 1/5 chance on the board. The profit pot is giving you much less than the actual odds of this dog winning. You need to get MORE to show a profit at the end of the week, month and year. Remember that the odds table is fair odds. You need to get MORE than that as a return.
Your dog 2 has a 25% chance of winning from your records. That is a probability of 3/1. Looking at the board, you see that dog 2 is at 6/1. That’s a double overlap! The crowd is willing to pay you double the actual odds that this greyhound will win. So the best play in this race is to bet that 2 wins, even though there is a 40% chance that 1 will actually win the race.
This means that 75% of the time you WILL LOSE the race. But remember… winning or losing a race is not the problem. Making money is the problem. Let’s look at the 2 dog that we hypothetically bet up.
According to his own research, this dog should win around 25% of the time. This means you WILL LOSE 75% of the time. But let’s look at a series of 12 races. This means that 12 times this month we bet a 3/1 dog with odds of 6/1.
Bet $2 12 times for a total of $24 in bets.
The dog wins 3 times (25%) with a probability of 6/1
You collect $14 each time. 3×14 = $42
$42 raised
-$24 wagered
—————–
$18 profit
And that’s how you lose 75% of the time and still make money.
CONCLUSION
Betting to win is part art and part math. But it’s a lot less complicated than building a complicated exotic bet. If you can hone your skills on the ‘art’ part of the process, the math part does the job on its own.
Now get to work playing to win in the WIN groups on the greyhound track!