Betting to Place
Place – Your horse has to come in first or second.
Next into the win bet, the Position wager is one of the oldest and most conventional. Having a place wager, your horse must finish first or second. The wager pays the same whether your horse wins or not.
Place and Show bets are more conservative, since you are giving yourself room for error because your horse can finish first or second, or first, second or third in the event of show. However this implies that the payoffs are somewhat lower because you’re sharing the place payoff with a different horse or two. They are are most commonly used along with other wagers, for example“win and put“,“across the board“ or“win, place, and display“, or“location and reveal“.
Put payoffs and results Place payoffs generally pay between $3.00 and $10.00, but might pay more with longshots and not as with overwhelming favorites. Since the cash you win in a position bet is made by all of the money bet on the horses that are losing, the greater horses at the race the greater your odds for a bigger place payoff.
Reading the Tote Board
One important distinction is that the Place pool is a wholly different pool than Win. It follows that horses may be bet differently in each one of the pools. In a place wager, as you don’t know which other horse will put, it is hard to forecast your prospective location payoffs. However, by comparing the place dollars to the win bucks, you can check the percentage of dollars on your own horse to set.
For example, looking at the #1 horse below, we can see he has approximately 10% of the win pool, with $2,011/$20,000 = 10%. If we utilize the Win odds to as a yardstick, we would expect the #1 would have roughly 10 percent of the Place pool wager on him, or $1,000 of the 10,000 Position pool. However, we can observe that #1 has just $622 wager to put, or closer to 6 percent of this pool. This means that the #1 is paying greater chances from the Place pool. The #1 is 8-1 to Win, however he is being wager like a 14-1 in the Place pool and will cover more accordingly.
This is like bargain shopping, when we get the value of a larger payoff when it“should“ provide a lesser payoff. The“must“ is based upon the assumption that the Win chances are more correct that the Place odds. This is a plausible assumption, however, as the Win chances are easier to see and much more attention is paid to them, it’s more likely that the Win chances are a truer reflection of their horse’s chances. Remember that when the 1 wins he will still pay more to acquire than to place (because Place needs to be divided with a different horse), but the #1 is a fantastic value in the Place pool. In this case, it may make sense to bet the #1 just to Place.
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