Quote:
|
Originally Posted by dalakhani
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.