Question, Seriously

[jpops757]

as far as the pk4 bet is concerned . The wrecker move wa Kings Drama pulling up. This was the other obvious single in my evaluation of the pps. I had 4 of the 3yrold fillies with Oneils being a must include as my 2nd choice.I used 6 pf the 3yr olds and only included CQ because of my single of KD. NO matter how I played it it want to the floor and on to the next race. Einstien would have been no better than 3rd or 4th choice for me. So is a 3 mout of 4 getting close? In my cas I say no because of where I ranked Einstien and just barely putting CQ on the ticket as the 4th 5th or6th option.

[blackthroatedwind]

Originally Posted by jpops757

as far as the pk4 bet is concerned . The wrecker move wa Kings Drama pulling up. This was the other obvious single in my evaluation of the pps. I had 4 of the 3yrold fillies with Oneils being a must include as my 2nd choice.I used 6 pf the 3yr olds and only included CQ because of my single of KD. NO matter how I played it it want to the floor and on to the next race. Einstien would have been no better than 3rd or 4th choice for me. So is a 3 mout of 4 getting close? In my cas I say no because of where I ranked Einstien and just barely putting CQ on the ticket as the 4th 5th or6th option.

3 out of 4 can be different things. It depends on many things. It depends on what you invested versus what you could have invested. It depends if you honestly took a tough beat in your one loss. It depends if you used too many in one race at the expense of using too few in another. It depends if you opinion bet one race and spread in the others to simply hit if your opinion horse won.

Let's assume you always invest the comfortable amount for yourself. Well, in this case you seem to have opinion bet King's Drama. Thus, for you, 3 out of 4 was nowhere near close. You liked him a lot and were dead wrong. That's an easy loss to absorb. Being wrong and losing is fine. If he won and you didn't use Circular Quay you played terribly, as even if you thought he was overrated and wanted to take a shot against him, you had to at least use him defensively.

The idea in a Pick-4 is to figure out, and this is obviously subjective and where your handicapping really comes into play, who the likeliest winners are in each race and relative to horses in other races. For example, it costs almost the same amount to use two in one race and four in another as it does to use three in both races. You have to make the decision, and it will affect your results over time, if the third horse in one of the races is more or less important to use in the overall bet than the fourth in the other. This, for example, happened to me yesterday at Gulfstream, and luckily for me I made the right decision to use the 8th winner at the exclusion of Lisa M in the 9th race. These are decisions many people avoid, or don't even think through fully, and they will devastate you over the long run.

Back to your case, it seems you played well, in that if your single had won you would have hit the bet....and that's really all that matters. One could pick your play apart, and perhaps you didn't maximize your possible returns, and that's something maybe you can look at. However, as I believe the most important thing is to hit these bets ( as the more you do this the more you open yourself up to hitting the occasional big one ), I would say you played well. You were wrong when it mattered to you....but would have cashed if you were right.