If you bet on horse races and sometimes bet on favorites, you may be asking yourself, “Just where is this Palookaville that Bill Peterson is talking about and why does he think I am going there?”
Palookaville is a state of mind, just over the line from Depressedville and adjacent to Broke. In other words, betting favorites is a way to go broke. I know favorites win a lot of races, but they don’t return a profit. That is the whole key to making money betting on horses. You have to find bets that make a profit. I know that sounds pretty academic, but it is amazing how many people know that fact and still can’t resist betting favorites.
Why is the favorite usually a bad deal? First of all, if something is obvious to the average horse player, it is probably worthless or even worse than that, dangerous. Just before the stock market crash of 1929 a very wealthy man withdrew all his money from the stock market. He survived the crash while others went broke.
When asked why he pulled out at precisely the right time, what had prompted him to do it, he said he’d gotten a tip from a cab driver to invest more. He went on to explain, when the average man on the street starts advising you to invest, it is time to get out. The same is true in horse racing. When the crowd loves a horse, it is time to look elsewhere for a bet. There are several reasons for that.
First of all, the easiest way to fix a horse race is to have the favorite lose. The highest percentage of money in the pools is bet on the favorite, so if you are interested in bilking the crowd and getting most of the money, you have to stop the favorite. That means you only have to deal with the connections of one horse. Cynical, you say, you bet I am and I’ve been betting on horses for years, not to mention that I’ve owned and raced horses.
The second reason that favorites are often a lousy bet is that they are over bet. The favorite bettor is often a person who is willing to trade profitability for security. They keep heaping the money on the horse until even if it wins it is a bad bet. How can a horse who wins be a bad bet? Look at it this way, how many times out of ten races will that horse win? Let’s say it can win 40% of the time, or 4 out of 10 races, that means it has to pay at least $5 in order for the bettors to break even. If it goes off at less than 3-2 odds it will pay less than $5 and therefore, it is a bad bet. That is another good reason that the next stop for all those geniuses who bet on it will be Palookaville, and trust me, it is not only not a good place to visit, but you definitely don’t want to live there.
