Learning To Bet From
The Dolphins
- By
Charles Carroll
There is a level of play in horse race betting that Ive
never seen. I keep hearing it exists, but I guess Ive never
moved in those circles. This level consists of the huge
bettors. The whales of handicapping. These are the guys who
are rumored to make a million or more a year through the windows.
Sometimes there are names attached to the stories, but I wont mention
them here, because maybe they are real and wouldn't like it and
might whack me out. I don't know if they're real guys who are
legendary or mythological guys who railbirds made up but I'm not
taking any chances.
There is some plausibility to these guys existence because
the Las Vegas casino rebates (a percentage of the takeout was returned
to major players just to have their action) was so significant that it
was outlawed in Nevada a couple of years ago. Reportedly, some of
these heavyweights who had moved in from NYOTB, then moved on to other
pastures. I know it sounds like an urban legend, but the law is
real, so I guess we can deduce they existed. (Theres actually a
lot more to it than that, and its an interesting story of modern
powers in this business of racing/simulcasting/Las Vegas/California/and
greed so check it out when you can.)
What I do not get, though, is how these dudes made
(or make) the million-plus a year through the windows. No,
seriously! In order to take back a million, do you know how many
millions you have to put through? Many, many even at moderate
odds but if you put many millions through, you're not going to get
moderate odds you're going to get minuscule odds because of
the pari-mutuelness of the sport. My brain gets a little bent
when I think about it. How would you do that? What
are the logistics? Maybe $25K a pop into big pools at
Belmont? Dropping $2K into a claiming race at Fonner Park is
likely to cause a minus pool, so where are you sending your money in
order to spread your millions? I did hear Barry Meadow (reputedly
a $500K per annum dolphin, if not whale) mention, in one of his talks
at the last Expo, finding a small, virtual sure-thing overlay in a
Place proposition somewhere and pounding it hard. I didn't catch
the amount, but I can buy that (I have a soft spot for Place overlays,
and reason to believe that Barry is a straight-shooter), so thats one
area where you might slip some serious cash. To run even a
half-mil through the windows each year, though, you'd need a lot
of high-quality shots and theyd better be high-quality, or youd be a
$2 bettor next year. Forgedaboutitif I ever have to spread a
million Ill worry about it then.
In the meantime, have you ever thought about why you seem to
be lighter the majority of the time when you come home from the
track? I certainly hope sonot that I hope youre losing, but
that you recognize the reality of variance that I wrote about earlier
in this column. According to most of the information you seeby
farmost horse race fans are $100-a-day-or-less bettors. If
thats what you are, youll go home lighter more often than notbut
there is a very important lesson to be learned from the whales. I
have never met the true, Great Blue Whales of horse race betting, but I
have met a significant number of dolphins. Barry Meadow
provided his figures in public, so I guess hes okay with having them
out there. Others I know have not made them public, so Im not
about to; but I will tell you one thing thats universal among the
other moderately-heavy-weight bettors whom I either know or have met:
they all readily admit that they do not grind out their
living from small steady profits on routine, day-to-day bets.
Every last one reports a very small positiveor even negative return
from routine bets. Their real profits their livings come
from occasional major scores.
Smaller players spend an inordinate amount of time worrying
about Return On Investment (ROI). If you think about the
dolphin scenario above, I suppose, theoretically, you could calculate
an ROIbut what would it mean? If a dolphins records show dozens
or hundreds of $10, $50, and $100 bets, which produce a very slight
positive or negative ROI, plus five or six big scores, suppose
you take away or add one big score? Better yet, suppose, as Ive
heard Andy Beyer report a couple of times, it was one huge
score at the end of a meet that pulled his butt out of the fire?
Take away that score, your ROI is pathetic; add another one like it,
and its humongous. Because these scores are so ephemeralfar
more so than routine wins and lossesand because they are central
to winning players profits, the effort of worrying about day-to-day
ROI is one of those stationary bicycle exercises: you build up a
terrific sweat but the scenery doesnt change.
The first lesson, which $100-a-day players with a serious
profit motive can learn from the dolphins is that the goal is not
grinding out a small ROI from routine $5, $10, and $20 bets. (Even
though, as I pointed out last time, you should keep scrupulous records
of bets no matter how small.) The goal is to use routine bets
to stay in the game and stay on top of your game, so that when the
opportunity to score appears, you recognize it and pound it.
The second lesson is the hardest of all: to realize
that the big scores that you shoot for with a limited daily
bankroll(for the vast majority of handicappers bankroll really means
percent-of-pocket) must be in proportion to your betting power.
If you are a $100-a-day bettor, and your normal condition is to go home
lighter (which is normal, and Ill talk about that explicitly
next time), then a $350 score every now and then should keep you
welland a more rare $600 or $700 score should put you in tall
cotton. These types of figures are far more realistic than trying
to swing for the fences with propositions like Pick-Sixes, where vast
numbers of small fish tend to be swallowed by the whales. If you
want to build toward Dolphin-level play, the trick is not to do
windmill-pirouettes like Mark McGuire and Sammy Sosa, but to choke up
on the bat and become a solid, placement hitter.
