Have you ever wanted to bet on horse, but didn’t know what to do?
Well now we’re going to show you how to win at horse betting. Although it is a little complicated, with this guide you will see that winning at the races and making money off of horse bets is quite simple. There’s lots of math involved in horse racing – that may scare some people away – but don’t worry! We’ll keep the complexities to a minimum for your entertainment.
First thing’s first though, what are odds? Odds are simply how likely something is to happen. As an example, if I said “What are the chances that there would be another Civil War?” You may say 1%, or 50% depending on your level of optimism about the US’s present state. Odds are how likely something is to happen; they can be positive or negative, and for this article we will only look at positive numbers.
Now that you know what odds are, let’s learn how to use them! Odds make it much easier to win horse bets, but since the math involved is a little complicated (although it sounds more complicated than it really is – I promise!) We’ll just show you some examples. First off, let us suppose that you bet $10 on one horse. If you win, say by picking the winning horse in a four way race between these horses:
– Havegoodday
– Elwaytaxtax
– Tonto
Then your payout would be:
– $25 (Since you bet $10 and won)
– Plus the original $10 you bet, so:
– $35 total winnings!
That’s just for one horse though. What if there were multiple horses in a race? Well then we add up how much each bet pays out, and that is your payout. For example, let us suppose that we have three horses running in this race:
– Havegoodday
– Elwaytaxtax
– Tonto
If you bet on all of them and they each win their respective races, your payout would be:
– $30 (Payout to Havegoodday) + $30 (Payout to Elwaytaxtax) + $30 (Payout to Tonto) = $90 total winnings!
That seems pretty easy, right? Well it is, but there are a couple rules to keep in mind when you’re betting. First off, if your horse does not finish first in its race then you don’t get any money. That means that if your horse finishes last – no matter how much the payout was – you lose your bet. The other thing to keep in mind is what we mentioned earlier, which is whether or not the odds of one horse winning are larger than another. We will show you an example:
Let’s say we have these three horses competing:
– Havegoodday
– Elwaytaxtax
– Paperstax
If you want to win this race, you should bet on Elwaytaxtax. Why? Well because they have the best odds of winning! We can figure that out by taking a look at the payout of each horse. Since Havegoodday wins half the time and pays out $20 per win, they are worth betting on. But since they only pay out when they win, they are only worth 1/2 of what Elway ta x t ax is worth. If they were running in a four way race with these three horses then their payout would be:
– $10 (Payout since it came first) + 1/2 times $10 (Payout since it came second) = $15 total winnings
The other thing to consider is if Elway ta x t ax were in a four way race with these three horses, their payout would be:
– 2/3 times $20 (Payout since they came first) + 1/3 times $20 (Payout since they came second) = $40 total winnings!
As you can see the only reason you would want to bet on Havegoodday over Elwaytaxtax even though they have similar odds of winning is because Elwaytaxtax only pays out 2/3 of what Havegoodday does. But other than that, Elwaytaxtax is the way to go!
So now that you know how to bet on horses and pick a winner let’s look at one more thing: What do we mean when we say “odds” of something happening? Well odds are simply another word for probability. So what does “probability” actually mean? It is defined as: The ratio of how many ways something can happen over the total number of possible outcomes. So in our previous example this would be:
– Number of ways Havegoodday can win (1) / 4
– Number of ways Elwaytaxtax can win (2) / 4
– Number of ways Tonto can win (1) / 4
– Number of ways Paperstax can win (1) / 4
Which is simplified to:
– 1/4 for Havegoodday
– 2/4 for Elwaytaxtax
– 1/4 for Tonto
– 1/4 for Paperstax
So what are the odds of this race?
Odds of Havegoodday winning = 1/4 = 25%
Odds of Elwaytaxtax winning = 2/4 = 50%
Odds of Tonto or Paperstax winning is 0% since they will not win. Therefore, the odds of either winning is 0/4 = 0%
Using this information you can bet on horses knowing whether they have a higher or lower chance of winning. Good luck and let’s hope your horse comes in first!