Obviously you feel the need to pipe in without reading all of what was written.

My point was that War Pass had not had a race at Tampa downs prior to the Tampa Derby. :rolleyes:

wow, the heat of this thread. The negative comments remind me of people who, knowing little other than the track take, claim that horseracing itself cannot be beaten.

For the record, I agree with dalakhani. Bridge-jumping can be a good bet. If Zenyatta had been in a 6-horse race instead of 7, I would have bet at least $25K on her to show.

--Dunbar

:( you disappoint me dun..

But you still automatically dismiss Ateam? You are disappointing me (as if you care LOL) because I Know you have a more open mind than that.

Its one thing when you completely dismiss someone with no cred on here like me. But Dunbar? If I were YOU, instead of being disappointed in Dunbar, I would be asking him why he sees things this way. I think it is obvious to anyone that has read anything that he has posted that Dunbar is a pretty darn good gambler.

Perhaps in getting that take, you continue to dismiss it. But maybe, just maybe, you learn something that will help to make you more money.

Just my take though and take it for what it is worth. No offense intended so you dont have to flame me.

Man, I'm tired as hell of this conversation. I was just messing with Dunbar.

I love how there is so much testosterone and piss on this board that almost every thread disintegrates into immature name-calling, bickering and enthusiastic use of the :zz: smiley.

You sound like Andy Rooney.

Did you ever wonder if you are?

Ya needle.

I agree Arlus. There are lots of ways to make money in gambling on horse races. I am open to listening to any way that might be different than what i am use to. I just choose to look at every angle.

In blackjack, is it always stupid to hit 12 against the dealer 4? At one time, I actually thought it was because i listened to all of the people and read all of the beginner books on basic strategy that told me so. It wasnt until I watched, learned and listened did i realize that there are times when hard 12 against dealer 4 is a great bet.

I go on sites like these to exchange ideas and to learn. It doesnt seem like that attitude is shared by many.

come on, there was an exchange of ideas. most people on here don't recommend this type of wager with such a microscopic ROI. a few see a place for it. just because most are not in favor of the wager does not mean that people aren't here to exchange ideas and learn. go ahead, become a bridgejumper. if you don't have 200K to start with, start with whatever level you have. if its a good wager for the guy who risked 200K to make 10K, then its also a good wager for someone who wants to risk $2,000 to make $100. keep us posted on your progress. I guarantee that you will last until your first loss, or perhaps your first show photo, and then you will give it up for good.

that is really a good point... it can be a good bet once or so.

The more you make the first bet mentioned, the more likely you are to come out completely stripped. Some people attempted to show this earlier in the thread.

The first photo...after your heartattack.

I still dont get how you make that big a bet that big with one minute.
I would like to understand that. You have a bunch of trustworthy people
helping out... maybe I missed it earlier. The Vegas thing, I dont see how
that flies.

Oh please. Re-read the thread because i just did. For no reason other than I had a different take I was insulted and called childish names. Yeah, great exchange of ideas. Now, I didnt say YOU did. My point is that you make it seem like everyone was just chatting like we were at some cocktail party and that isnt the case. And that is par for the course for any idea that is not "accepted" by the clique. Thats fine...I dont need to be a part of some internet club to feel whole. But please... don't misrepresent.

And even in this last post, you attempt to patronize me and you even make the assumption that I don't already employ bridgejumping as a method at times. How would you know? How can you make these assumptions?

Can I guess, with all of these assumptions, what type of gambler you are and how much success you have had at it?

But Pgardn, why does bridgejumping have to be a consistent betting pattern? Why can't it simply represent value on an individual race basis?

I love to hear "value of the race". That comment is great especially when the "value" doenst have a realistic shot of actually winning. And how many times have you heard that? The best "value" to me is the bet most likely to win. And Dunbar brought up an excellent point- if there was no value in bridgejumping, why do tracks often cancel show betting in five horse fields?

Stop your whining.........people disagreed with your opinion and offered examples on why they didn't think your opinion is correct. You seem to summarily dismiss an opposing view, which is your prerogative, but try not to be so pompous. People disagree with your point of view, get over it and stop playing the poor me card. It is tiresome and will only detract from your posts if you ever have something worthwhile to add.

and yours is indeed a worthwhile contribution. Thanks.

its clear you mainly post for dramatic effect, focusing on insults and searching for so-called patronizing remarks, instead of the numerous comments regarding the subject that were contained herein.

I assumed that you don't already employ bridgejumping because you didn't seem to know much about it, and because you don't come across as a person that gambles on horses a lot. sorry if you think thats patronizing but that is my opinion based on your comments.

We differ in this respect. I dont look at bridgejumping as an individual event. I look at it as an opportunity that occurs more than once and someone is going to bet it more than once. Taken as a whole, if you keep making the bets, I see getting stripped eventually.

You might see it as a bet made very, very infrequently. If we take the example that started the thread, you could definitley make some money with a big risk. So again it is how one evaluates risk. I think the risk of Zenyatta finishing out of the money is too large for the bet made for me. So the crux of the matter is how many times out of, lets say 100, does the horse finish out of the money? If your answer is 1, chances are you get stripped if you play it enough.

So in my view, I guess what you should be saying is I am going to play this way very infrequently. And your point is that each individual bridgejump is a diff. race and that is true. But even in the surest of these, I just think the risk of the horse finishing out of the money is too big even though the frequency of occurence is very low ( maybe 1 out of 100, and I think this is being very kind).

And tracks dont take the show bridgejumping bets because the pool just is not big enough to pay back 5% on a big bet. Now if the tracks actually gave you back what your bridgejump is really worth (instead of a mininum of 2.10 it would be the real pool money, say 2.0001) then you would not be making the bet. You are really using the fact the track will pay you that 5 cents on the dollar to your advantage. But in reality, if the track really crunched the pool numbers, they would be giving back some show bets of 1/100 of a penny because the bet was small and someone else came in and bridgejumped.
In other words, tracks could pay out show bets on four horse fields if they did not use 2.10 minimum. The payouts would most likely be pitifully low and no way to pay some patrons 1/100 of a penny they won instead of a dime.

Exactly Pgardn. Exactly! The bet should only be paying out 2.0001 and you are going to make 2.10. And thats a bad bet?

You are right though. Bridge Jumping a lot of times is a fools bet and the math that has been layed out in this thread no doubt supports that. No denying. But in the right situation, it seems like you are getting value because the payoff is much higher than it should be. At that point, it depends on how you, as you say, view the risk.

Thanks Pgardn.

For me it would be akin to attending a sale in which I dont want to buy anything because the prices are still too high for the value of the product.

But thats me.

I am also famous for not liking Pik bets (and I got raked
for that) unless I really like all the races I am betting. I see it as more entertainment.
So I still put them together, I just realize I am not following
my usual betting principles. I dont/cant live off this game like
some apparently do.

What I would like to know is how the guy that put 200k on her got the money into the pool so quickly. With 3MTP, the money wasn't there, with 1MTP, the money was in there.

Now at Arlington, the max dollar amount wager is $250, which you can hit multiple times, so he would have had to have 800 $250 show bets on that horse here. Now, I have punched out a ticket 100 times before, and it has taken me about 4 minutes to do it, and that is just hitting the repeat button

Batch betting?

If you have the 200,000 what do you need the 10,000 for?

and if you have two dollars why do you need ten cents?

I doubt these people are down to their last 200k. I'm guessing there are multi millionaires that want their racing rush just like the regular joes. Besides, it makes for good boasting at the club when you hit.

If bridge jumpers were multi-millionaires looking for a rush I doubt they'd find it playing horses to show for a 5% return.

But if they love the game, how else would they play ... for that dime?

Or maybe spend a few million on some yearlings ? Talk about bridge jumping.

I would imagine it was arranged ahead of time. Maybe even done in Vegas.

$1000.00 can go on each ticket ( 4 x 250 )

200 tickets

now I am not saying it was a good idea... but it was a better idea than betting the horse to win.

Big win bets, pick sixes, etc. . . Maybe buying horses. Most likely playing craps or blackjack at a casino or betting on sports, though. I think somewhere on here you can find a post about Nick Lachey's betting habits - very illuminating.

Exacta box all.

But other sports aren't horse racing, and neither is blackjack. I'd probably go the pick six route and play big tickets when the pots get fat.

That is kinda what I was thinking but still, 200 tickets is no joke, that is about 1.5 or 2 inches worth of tickets, all having to be punched in 2 minutes, I dont see it.....

I am just curious how it was done, that is all..Maybe some totes can take a 1k bet, and then it would only be 50 tickets

Why are you assuming that some dude walked in to a track/sportsbook with $200K and placed the bet?

Excuse the ignorance.
But this sort of implies you would need more than one person placing
bets. Is this correct?

Cause I, like Scavs, dont get how you make a 200k bet in the last minute.

That's not what batch betting is. . . here's an explanation: http://www.chrb.ca.gov/committee_pac...pr2003PMOC.pdf

Thanks.

Dunbar, I always respect your opinion but I don't think I can agree with you here. I agree with you that in theory, a horse at any odds could be a good bet. If you are getting higher odds than what the true odds are, then your bet will have a positive ROI over time. I'm not big on betting favorites, but I realize that if you have a 3-5 shot that has a 75% chance of winning, that is a good bet.

That being said, I would have an extremely hard time finding a bridge-jumping bet that is a good bet. If it was at a track where the minimum pay-off was $2.20, then it might be possible to find some value. But if you are only getting $2.10, I don't see it. If you are getting $2.10 to show, you have to win that bet 95% of the time, just to break even. Even when I see some of these 1-5 shots and 1-9 that look unbeatable, I don't think that I would make their chances of hitting the board higher than 95%. I have seen these horses run out of the money too often. I think it is more often than 5% of the time that these horses run off the board.

If you could find a horse that you thought had a 96% chance of hitting the board, then you would have a 1% edge betting that horse to show if you were getting $2.10. I think you would be very hard pressed to find a horse that has a 96% chance of hitting the board.

In the previous example, my math was slightly off. The edge would be even less than 1%. It would actually be 0.8%. So even if you could find a horse that you thought would hit the board 96% of the time, which I don't think you could find, your edge would be less than 1%. It would be 0.8%.

I think bridge jumping is pretty stupid but Zenyatta was a relatively safe bet to show. . .

Hello Rupert-

if you dont mind me asking, what would you have placed Zenyatta's chances of hitting the board at on saturday?

What if the field shrunk to 6? How about to 5?

I would say her chances were probably somewhere in the 90-95% range. It would be hard to be any more precise than that. Actually her chances were probably better than 90%. I don't think she had a 1 in 10 chance of running out of the money. She probably had somwhere between a 1 in 15 and a 1 in 20 chance of running out of the money. So that would mean her chances of hitting the board were probably somewhere in the 92-95% range.

If there would have been one scratch, I don't think it would have improved her chances all that much. The mostly likely way that she was going to run out of the money was if she just didn't fire. It is conceivable that if she didn't fire, that one less horse in the race could make the difference of her running 3rd instead of 4th. But that seems like a real long-shot. I don't think one less horse would improve her chances by more than 1-2%. So with 6 horses in the field, maybe her chances of hitting the board would have been somewhere between 93-96% or something like that.

The problem is there is no way to be so precise that you can say exactly what the chances are. But if you are betting a horse to show that is going to only pay $2.10, you have to be extremely precise because there is no room for error. If your estimation is off by only a couple of percentage points, you may be inadvertently making a bet that has a negative ROI.

I don't think you could ever find a horse in a 5 horse field that only has 1 chance in 50 of running out of the money. Maybe it would be possible to find a horse that has only 1 chance in 25 or 1 chance in 30 of running out of the money. So that would mean that the horse has a 96-97% chance of hitting the board. If that were the case, you would have somewhere between a 0.8-1.85% edge. So that would probably be the best case scenario. But if you were even 2% off in your estimation, then you would have a negative expectation.

If there is anybody out there that is so good that they can estimate a horse's chances of hitting the board almost perfectly and not be off by more than a percent, then that person would not be wasting their time making show bets on horses paying $2.10. If you were that good so that you could say exactly what a horse's true odds were, you would have a huge edge. You'd probably have a 10-20% edge. You wouldn't be wasting your time looking for show bets paying $2.10. That would only give you a 1% edge or so.

Rupert, thanks for the serious and thoughtful reply. You are certainly correct that it makes no sense to think of the big show bets as +5% ev.

Still, I'm pretty sure I could convince you (or anyone else who is comfortable with algebra) that making very large show bets on certain odds-on favs is a good bet. I know that's hard to believe, but I really am quite sure of it. I'll take the time to spell out my reasoning sometime in the next 2 months. Right now I'm nearing the end of an extended vacation roadtrip.

--Dunbar