Gentlemen, Place Your Bets

On a clear, beautiful, blue-skied day in Miami last winter, nothing was clearer or more beautiful than my insight into the second race at Gulfstream Park. As I studied the data in the Daily Racing Form, I could barely contain my excitement.

Cougar Island had run at Gulfstream two weeks earlier, and on paper, his performance looked mediocre: He had shown brief speed but had tired to finish 12 lengths behind the winner. I had watched all of the races that day and I had concluded that the inside part of the track had been deep and tiring—no horse running near the rail had been able to win. Cougar Island had been pinned on the rail, battling head and head with two very fast rivals before he succumbed. His show of speed under those conditions had, in fact, been an admirable effort. Now he was entered against a very different kind of field, one in which all of the other horses tended to break slowly and rally in the stretch. Cougar Island had the potential to burst out of the starting gate and take a commanding lead without even being challenged.

As post time approached, with Cougar Island ten to one on the odds board, I whispered to a confidant, "This is as close to a perfect situation as you're ever going to see." Of course, I had uttered similar sentiments hundreds of times in the past and had frequently been wrong, because of either faulty judgment or bad luck. This is not an easy game. Even so, a committed horse player cannot waver when he holds such a strong opinion, and I bet as much on Cougar Island as a rational man could reasonably bet on a horse that had never won a race.

I watched intently as the starting gate sprung open—and after only a few strides, I knew I had been right. Cougar Island cruised to the lead effortlessly and was four lengths in front before his jockey had even urged him to run. After he crossed the wire six lengths in front of his nearest pursuer, I was standing at the cashier's window, collecting neatly wrapped packets of $100 bills, reaffirming once again my conviction that this is the most wonderful game in the world.

Other people who love Thoroughbred racing may rhapsodize about the nobility of the animals, about the beauty and ambience of the best race tracks, about the pure excitement of the sport; but the reason that racing has so many passionate devotees is summed up by my experience with Cougar Island. This is a participatory sport; people in the grandstand are involved as actively as jockeys, trainers and owners, for they are playing a gambling game that is endlessly fascinating and challenging. The outcomes of horse races are influenced by so many complex factors that no computer has ever been able to master the game. So when a horse player does pick a winner and makes a triumphant visit to the cashier's window, he feels a sense of exhilaration very much different from the way a gambler feels when he wins money on the roll of dice or the spin of a roulette wheel. A payoff at the track represents a reward for skill and judgment, not a lucky guess on a random event. Indeed, the first rush of excitement a horse player feels after winning a race comes from the knowledge that he has been right when most of the people around him have been wrong; the money is secondary. Novices cashing a two-dollar bet will experience much the same kind of elation that a professional does when he is collecting one of those neat packets of $100 bills.

Ask any passionate horse player about his first trip to the track, his first bet, his first winner, and he is likely to remember it as vividly as his first love. William Murray, a writer for The New Yorker and the author of several race-track novels, told me this archetypal first-trip-to-the-track story: "I was sixteen, home from prep school and staying with my father in New York," Murray related. "My cousin had married a horse degenerate named Harry Woodard, and he suggested we go to the races at old Aqueduct. My father objected but thought it would be a good moral lesson for me to watch Harry blow a bundle.

"We had five winners in a row and we came to a race where Harry said, 'Nobody can pick this race; Bill, you pick it,' and my horse barreled in at nineteen to one. We swept into New York, had dinner (continued on base 127)Place Your Bets(continued from page 118) at '21,' scalped Broadway tickets and got home at two A.M. My father was propped up in bed, reading Thucydides in the original Attic Greek, and he asked, 'How did you do?' I said, 'Harry won fourteen Gs and I won four C notes. Why don't we do this more often?' "

Decades later, horses are still Murray's passion; one memorable day at the track changed the course of his life. And the spirit with which he approached his first day at the races is one that every novice should embrace. Don't go to the track as a spectator; be an active participant. That isn't always easy. Despite the enormous appeal of the sport, the race track can be an intimidating place for a newcomer. It doesn't have the congenial atmosphere of, say, a New York Giants game or a Bruce Springsteen concert, where everybody has come for the same shared experience. It is a subculture with its own special language and code of conduct. Under the system of wagering that prevails at all American tracks, horse players bet against one another, not against the house. So even though the player sitting next to you may be a kindred spirit, he is also an adversary. A neophyte who walks into a track with no preparation may feel that he is in a bewildering or even hostile environment.

When friends ask me to take them to the races for the first time, I am happy to oblige, but I always insist on conducting a tutorial session before we go. It begins with a reading from the sport's bible.

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The Daily Racing Form: On a few occasions, I have been at tracks where the delivery of the Daily Racing Form was delayed by natural disaster, and horse players have reacted with the shock and sense of helplessness that eastern European citizens might feel when their stores run out of bread and milk. Life without it is unthinkable.

A beginner should buy a copy of the Form and familiarize himself with it before he ever sets foot inside a track. Forget the editorial content; the heart of the newspaper is the records of horses entered in every race—the past performances, or P.P.s. They summarize a horse's over-all record and describe in detail each of its last ten starts; models of concision, they compress all the information about each previous race into a single line of type. No racing paper in the world comes close to providing the quantity of information that American horse players take for granted in the Form.

Study of the Form can be an arcane science, but even a casual fan can glance at the P.P.s and tell which horses are coming into a race after sharp recent efforts, which ones can be expected to show early speed and which will come from behind, which are consistent and which are erratic. If a horse player has even a rudimentary understanding of the Form, just about everything that happens at the track will be comprehensible to him. Take a look at the box on page 119 for a guide to the small print.

One important caveat: When studying the Form, don't wear light-colored clothing. Despite its $2.50 price, which makes it the most expensive daily newspaper in America, the Eastern edition of Rupert Murdoch's publication employs cheap ink, so a serious player who spends an hour making notations on it will find that his forearm has turned black. Dress appropriately.

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Accommodations: Race tracks offer general-admission seating in the grand-stand and the clubhouse (typically, about two dollars and four dollars, respectively), reserved seats (another buck or two) and a dining room. Some have a posh private turf club. This is a matter of personal preference, but if I wanted a tuxedoed waiter serving me duck à l'orange, I would be more inclined to go to a restaurant than to Aqueduct.

I like to savor the atmosphere of the race track. Clubhouse general admission usually offers adequate seating and a level of civility that is acceptable to all but the most fastidious racegoers. If you go with binoculars, try to find a high location near the finish wire with good sight lines. If you don't have binoculars, find a spot near a television monitor.

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Tip Sheets, Touts and Turf Advisors: After entering the track, you will buy the official program, an essential source of late information that may not be in the Racing Form: the betting numbers for the horses, the final jockey assignments, the names of horses receiving medication. And as you are getting your program, someone nearby will be imploring you to buy a tip sheet, a one-page publication with a name such as "Eddie's Green Card," promising the winners of the day's races.

There was a time when innocents at the track were well advised to stay away from any stranger offering advice or information. Tip-sheet sellers would often keep a small printing press in a truck near the track; after four or five races, they would reprint their card, telling late arrivals that they had picked all the winners who had run so far and distributing the phony cards after the races as bait for the next day. Worse than the tip-sheet sellers were the touts—hustlers who would approach strangers and claim to have inside information on the upcoming race that they would share in exchange for a wager on the horse. In a ten-horse race, a tout would ideally try to find ten clients and whisper to them the names of ten horses.

Flagrant con artistry is rarer nowadays, not because the human soul has become nobler but because there are enough good sources of race-track information to have driven out most of the bad sources. Selectors for many daily newspapers are serious students of the game. Some tip sheets—such as "The Wizard," "Inside Track by the ... Beard" and "Clocker Lawton" at the New York tracks and "Baedeker's Guide" in California—are well respected and have earned an enthusiastic following. The West Coast, in fact, has given rise to an entire industry of turf advisors. The Western edition of the Racing Form is filled with ads for breakfast seminars, typically costing $20, where a professional handicapper will analyze the day's card; the presentations are usually enlightening.

So there is no harm in seeking professional counsel at the track, but in the long run, there is no profit in it, either. A two-dollar bet on the selections of even the best public handicappers would almost certainly produce a loss over a long period of time. A bettor may listen to others, but he should ultimately make his own decisions. At the very least, he will get to enjoy the mental stimulation of analyzing the races and the special satisfaction that comes from picking a winner that he can call his own.

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Handicapping: A newcomer to the track will immediately be struck by the seriousness of the people around him. Many will be reading the Racing Form with the earnestness of Talmudic scholars and discoursing knowledgeably about the horses in the next race. When the race is run, however, it may look like such a chaotic scramble that nobody can realistically have predicted its outcome. And, indeed, when it is over, the vast majority of those same souls who were poring over the Form will be tearing up their tickets and cursing their bad fortune.

It may appear that people trying to make logical sense of horse races are playing a fool's game, one as hopeless as that of casino gamblers who think they can beat roulette with a system. But Thoroughbred races aren't a random spin of the wheel. They are sufficiently governed by the logic that, at every track, there are a few quiet, anonymous professionals or semiprofessionals who will dependably make money over the long term by betting the horses. Few fit the Runyonesque image of a swaggering gambler with a loud sports coat and a big cigar. Many are college-educated; most are serious-minded and studious to the point of obsessiveness. They may employ widely diverse methods of handicapping—the term that encompasses the entire process of analyzing a race. Many modern-day handicappers use complex mathematical methods to analyze the times of races and to evaluate horses on the basis of their speed. Others depend on watching races intently, looking for horses that are blocked or bumped or otherwise victimized by bad racing luck. Some place an emphasis on their observations of horses in early-morning workouts. Some judge horses according to their physical condition as they warm up before a race. All of these approaches demand virtually full-time effort, and realistically; a once-a-week horse player cannot expect to enjoy the same results as a professional. Yet the existence of the pros proves that racing is not necessarily a sucker's game, and that putting effort into handicapping can pay off.

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The Paddock: The most picturesque part of a race track is the paddock and walking ring, where trainers will saddle their horses and confer with their jockeys before boosting them onto the horses' backs. In an era when the trend of the industry is toward off-track betting and the development of simulcast facilities—race tracks with no live horses—bettors sometimes forget that this sport is being conducted by magnificent flesh-and-blood animals capable of achieving speeds of 40 miles per hour, the product of two centuries of concerted human effort to breed the ultimate running machine. The paddock is where you may admire these animals at close range—a side pleasure that should not be missed.

Some expert bettors rely heavily on their judgment of the horses' appearance before a race, but it takes a great deal of experience to develop the necessary visual skills. Even so, newcomers might visit the paddock and try to spot animals that look more robust than their rivals, that aren't sweating profusely or wearing front-leg bandages, and that seem to exude an air of controlled energy.

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Odds and the Tote Board: On a large electronic board in the middle of the infield and on television monitors throughout the track, odds for each horse in the upcoming race are displayed and updated minute by minute. The odds are determined by the amount of money bet on each horse. The track itself acts as a middleman: It accepts the wagers, takes a fixed fee for its services and pays all of the remaining money to the winners. (The track's cut, plus taxes that go to the state, may typically be 17 percent.) Unlike a casino, which makes money when its customers lose theirs, the track is a neutral participant in the gambling process.

If the crowd at a track bets $200,000 on a race, and the track removes its 17 percent "take," or $34,000, the sum of $166,000 will be distributed to people who have bet the winner. If the crowd has bet a total of $16,600 on the winning horse, a successful bettor will get back ten dollars for each dollar he wagered. If the crowd has bet $83,000 on the horse, a winner will collect two dollars for each dollar he bet.

Nobody has to worry about these calculations, because a computer makes them and shows the probable return in the form of odds. The odds signify the amount of profit a bettor will make for each dollar he wagers. If a horse is 7–1, a bettor will make a seven-dollar profit for each dollar he puts in—in addition to getting his initial investment back. Because the basic unit of race-track wagering is two dollars, a 7–1 shot will pay $16—a $14 profit, plus the original two-dollar bet.

When horses are heavily bet, their odds are quoted differently—for example, eight to five—to permit a more precise estimation of the payoff. A tote board will read 8—5 because it can't use decimal points and say that a horse's odds are 1.6 to 1, which is the same thing. Such a horse would return a $3.20 profit for two dollars, plus the original two dollars, for a payoff of $5.20. Most race-track programs list the payoffs for such odds, but all serious bettors quickly learn them by heart.

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Types of Wagers: For most of the history of Thoroughbred racing, the object of the game has been to pick the best horse in the race and bet that he will win. But since the mid-Seventies, race tracks have offered an ever-growing array of "exotic" or "multiple" wagers—quinellas, exactas, trifectas, pick sixes, pick nines, twin trifectas, double quinellas—that involve picking more than one horse or race. (Check the track's program for explanations of the betting options.) The most popular form of betting at American tracks today is the exacta, which requires picking the first two finishers in a race in the correct order.

Traditionalists decry the new forms of wagering, saying that they have turned a grand sport into a lottery or a numbers game; but for most horse players, these exotic wagers have been a welcome invention. In the old days of simple win betting, it was virtually impossible for a bettor with a moderate bank roll to walk out of the track with a huge profit. But when an exacta combining two logical horses can easily pay 50–1, and when more exotic wagers sometimes return payoffs in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, horse racing offers possibilities for turning a modest investment into a windfall profit.

Even so, the natural instinct of newcomers is to bet cautiously. They may be inclined to make show wagers—i.e., bet that a horse will finish first, second or third—which are relatively easy to win but yield low payoffs. As a rule, these players will cash a few tickets, collecting $7.20 here and $3.60 there, and go home losing a few dollars. To people with this prudent approach, I say, Don't be a wimp. If you want to be cautious with your money, buy a savings bond.

When I escort novices to the track, I recommend that they take a modest amount of capital that they are prepared to lose—an amount, say, that they wouldn't mind spending on dinner in a fancy restaurant. But they should bet this money aggressively, not defensively, trying to make one or two hits that will produce a profit for the entire day. Exactas are the best vehicle. A common strategy is to "box" three horses—play all possible combinations involving those horses—which costs $12 for a two-dollar unit bet. Another is to "key" one horse over two or three others—bet your horse to finish first, in combination with other possible second-place finishers.

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At the Betting Windows: As post lime approaches, horse players converge on the betting windows to get their wagers down, and while the scene may appear to be frenzied and chaotic, it is (or at least ought to be) governed by a strict code of conduct. Bettors should be thoughtful enough to call their bets in the proper fashion, conclude the transaction as quickly as possible and allow the next person in line to reach the seller.

It is impermissible for the bettor to say to the ticket seller something like this: "I think I'm going to box two, seven and (continued on page 158)Place Your Bets(continued from page 128) eleven. But I really don't know about this seven horse. Maybe I should go with the eight. Who do you like in the race, anyway?" If you do this and I happen to be the next person in line, I will deliver a stinging rebuke. If there are 15 seconds left before post time and I am in danger of being shut out, I may throttle you.

Bettors uncertain about the proper procedures should bet early, not in the last-minute crush, but all should learn proper conduct at the windows: Have your bets written on your program; don't expect to make any last-second decisions. Have the money in your hand. Call your bets in the following order: amount, type of bet, horse's number. For example. "Five dollars to win on number eight. Two-dollar exactas, eight-one, eight-five, eight-six."

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Watching the Race: In order to see a race clearly, it is no longer necessary to tote unwieldy binoculars of the sort that General Patton might have used to observe enemy troops. Binoculars are now made in compact sizes (such as 8 x 20) that will fit into a pocket but will nevertheless give a razor-sharp view of a race. But there are plenty of horse players, even serious ones, who don't bother with binoculars at all, preferring to watch races on closed-circuit television. In either case, a bettor should take a look at his horses when they go onto the track and make a mental note of the cut and the color of the jockey's silks so he can follow the progress of his investment when the race is on.

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Rooting: The running of a race is a minute or two of intense excitement and noise as thousands of people implore different horses, cheer their victories and curse their losses. Nevertheless, a few rules of etiquette must govern such behavior.

One day at Hialeah, I bet $1000 on a horse and watched the race from the press box, rooting energetically. Next to me was a young man who was screaming for his horse with the level of emotion that one might normally reserve for pleading with the Mau Mau to spare one's infant child. When the young man's horse beat mine, I learned that he had bet two dollars and had won $20. My annoyance led to the formulation of the Beyer Rule of Rooting: While enthusiastic cheering is part of the game, wild and unrestrained displays of emotion are permissible only when the potential winnings equal ten percent of a bettor's annual income. I always stop to make this calculation before dropping to my knees, raising my arms and shouting, "I'm king of the world!"

It should be noted, however, that vociferous denunciations of jockeys are always considered permissible. After a race has been run, you may stand in the midst of a crowd and shout, "That crooked little pinhead! He ought to be arrested!" Regardless of what has transpired in the race, half the people around you will be nodding vigorously in agreement.

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If You Get Serious: Horse racing has always tended to appeal to a hard core of committed devotees rather than a broad base of casual fans, because the game usually inspires either passion or indifference. Those who find that the game strikes a responsive chord in them will want to explore new horizons—both intellectually and geographically.

Many serious, literate books about handicapping have been published in recent years. Steve Davidowitz' Betting Thoroughbreds is an excellent primer. William Quirin's Winning at the Races employs computer-generated statistics as a basis for understanding the sport. The Body Language of Horses, by Tom Ainslie and Bonnie Ledbetter, explains ways to judge horses' physical appearance. My book, Picking Winners, helped trigger the current popularity of speed handicapping; The Winning Horseplayer describes a more advanced approach called trip handicapping. James Quinn's The Best of Thoroughbred Handicapping is a survey of all the major literature on the subject.

As new fans develop a fondness for the sport and a national perspective, they will want to see the famous races and race tracks that they read about in the Daily Racing Form. The Breeders' Cup, the one-day extravaganza with seven rich championship races, is the sport's most compelling attraction; it will be held this fall at Belmont Park on Long Island, next fall at Louisville's Churchill Downs. And every horse player should probably see one Kentucky Derby, though one is enough; crowded, chaotic days of major-slakes races are often less fun than a normal day at a wonderful track. Even for an ordinary midweek racing card, a visitor will have his breath taken away at the sight of Santa Anita, in Arcadia, California, with its majestic backdrop of the San Gabriel Mountains. Saratoga Race Course, in Saratoga Springs, New York, is permeated by so much history and tradition that it is easy to envision what the sport was like in the last century, when plungers such as Diamond Jim Brady and Bet-a-Million Cates were regular customers.

When a horse player does travel to far-flung tracks, he will appreciate the strength and universality of the game's appeal. I have played the horses in places as diverse as Thailand, Australia and Barbados, and while the tracks and the animals may be very different, I see the same character types everywhere, poring over their country's version of the Daily Racing Form, engaged in the never-ending quest to pick a winner.

"My father asked, 'How did you do?' I said, 'I won four C notes. Why don't we do this more often?' "