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