Two keys to winning long shot bets on handicap horse racing
Winning long shots is a great thrill and of course very profitable as long as you don’t spend more money on the long shot than the stake pays. The key to making money betting on high-priced horses is to do it selectively. Simply betting on a horse because it is a long shot will not make a profit in the long run.
So some guidelines to weed out the bad bets and find the good ones will help increase profits. To understand what constitutes an unlikely good bet, let’s first look at the competition.
Key #1. Large fields reduce your chances of winning due to racing luck, traffic issues and unknown factors.
The more horses there are in a race, the greater the chance that any horse you bet on, whether it be favorite, longshot or something in between, will run into traffic. You also have to take into account the luck in the races. Luck in racing means all those little intangible things like tripping, getting hit, having to dodge a fallen horse, etc., that can happen when there are more horses in a race. Then there are the unknown factors. As you run a handicap in a horse race, you look at all the information available for each runner. Sometimes something might get lost or just not printed, but it’s still a vital factor. The more horses, the more chance there is that a bit of information will slip out of you and cost you victory.
Key #2. Lightning strikes twice, or the old fashioned “two things.”
The second key is about something that happens twice. They say that lightning never strikes the same place twice, but that’s not true. In reality, lightning often strikes the same spot twice because there was something, like an iron deposit in the ground, that caused it to strike in the first place, which is pretty much why the old “two” works. things”. I call it thing two because I have found that if something happens once, it will often happen again.
Applying this key to long shots, if a horse has won before over distance, on the same surface, and at the same level of competition, I think it’s a better bet. So one of the keys to finding a good long shot bet is to find a horse that has done what you are asking of it today. It’s that easy. Occasionally, you’ll even find that the only horse in the field that has actually done all of that is a long shot. Many favorites have never shown the ability to win over distance and level of competition, yet people bet on them at low odds.
To summarize, when looking for good longshots, two keys to winning are: 1. avoid large fields and 2. look for a broker who has shown they can succeed in similar conditions.