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Betting on the Races – Basic Tips, Value Bets
06/10/10

Though horse racing has little in common with football and basketball betting, there’s one thing that’s pretty much the same in all racing and sports related gambling: one needs to find value, and get his money in on that value, otherwise he’ll just end up betting with the squares and wasting his money on negative EV (expected value) propositions. In sports betting, it is obvious why the EV is negative on square bets: the bookie balances the match-ups perfectly (making them 50-50 affairs) and the player still has to drop the bookie’s vig (which is kind of like the poker rake) when he wins.

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In horse racing, if you continually back bad value horses, you’ll drop money in the long-run, because you’ll be playing under the odds pretty much all the time. The tough thing about the value in horse racing is that it has little to do with how good you are at picking the winner. Most bettors look for the winner all the time and care little about whether the winner carries value or not.
How do you find value bets though? Theoretically, it’s quite easy: all you need to do is to create a betting forecast of your own and then to compare your ratings with those of the actual market. Thus, if you rate a horse 5/1 and it’s 8/1 in the real market, chances are you have value on your hands, simple and straightforward, right? Well, not exactly. You see, the very fact that the method is based on something subjective (your own betting forecast) can hide many pitfalls, which pretty much means that if you’re not a sharp bettor, relying on such methods to determine the presence of value doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. What does make sense though is the checking of the ratings offered by specialized and reliable websites. Yes, there are websites out there whose objective is to home in on value bets, thus offering clueless rookies a chance to get their money into the middle on a positive EV proposition.

Make sure you know exactly where you’re looking though. The stats that you’re interested in are stats created from value stats, designed specifically to find value bets. These stats are nothing like the ones meant to help you find the winners. Those too can be helpful but again: they only help you find the winner, they do nothing about the value that you should really be after.
Much like in football betting, in horse racing there are false favorites too. The false favorite is usually a horse overbet for whatever reason: it may be in an outstanding shape, the jockey may be a top one etc. Obviously, there’s not a whole value in such false favorites. Fortunately, there are underbet favorites as well. The way to identify a false favorite is to log in to one of the above mentioned sites which offer ratings based on value and see if a favorite has a high or low rating. If the value rating is low, the favorite is likely a false one. If the value rating is high, the favorite carries good value.

If the ratings site you choose in indeed a good one, you’ll notice a pretty sharp difference between high and low rated favorites performance-wise. While low rated favorites can have winning rates as low as 21%, high rated favorites can go up all the way to 38%. The loss rates can drop from around 33% (on a bottom rated fav) to about 1.5%.

If you’re a sports bettor contemplating a move to online poker, make sure you only sign up to a poker room which offers you a rakeback deal. Poker rakeback is a lot like the bonuses offered by your online bookmaker at sign-up: they bite right into the juice thus increasing your profit margin.