Betting on all the other horses would probably not be profitable at bookmaker odds, because of the bookmaker’s overround. (That is, the odds of all the horses are adjusted downwards from the calculated chance, giving the bookie his profit margin.) On a typical horse race, the overround might be 120%, which means that you’d have to bet £120 spread across all horses to return £100.
As Usram says, you can “lay” horses on Betfair, but I don’t think Americans can legally use it. An acquaintance of mine won his biggest ever bet laying Big Brown.
From memory, the odds to lay were about 1.33, or 1-3, rather than 1.25 (or 1-4) at the bookies. (The upside of this for the punter is that you also get higher odds when backing.)
The way this works is that you take money from another punter (say £1000) and if the horse wins, youhave to return it with that punter’s winnings (in this case £333, making a total of £1333).
However, if the horse loses, you keep the punter’s £1000. And because there is no bookmaker, there is typically hardly any overround - maybe 100.5% on a market with lots of liquidity.
Some people do make quite a profit from it. (I might add I am not one of them). If you go to the local betting shop/ TAB and see the absolute flakes there, it is easy to arrive at the conclusion you must be a better judge than them.
The short answer is that “because he has a better than 1-4 odds of winning.”
People like to make statements about not betting such heavy favorites, but the expected value of a bet on a 1-4 shot is going to similar to the expected value of a bet on a 6-1 horse, a 38-1 horse, or pretty much any other bet you want to make at the track.
Kelly Pavlik was (supposedly) a 20-1 favorite in a boxing match saturday night. Obviously, that’s quite different than a horse race, less variable, but Max Kellerman said, “no one should ever be a 20-1 favorite against another professional boxer.”
well, maybe. Maybe not.
Tyson and Lennox Lewis both famously lost in fights with such long odds, but if you go back over all such fights with long odds like that, would you actually have made money? That’s the question.
But, if the OP was askign about getting .25 cents back, instead of $1.25, that’s a different answer, and already been handled.
Still, how many years can we have a horse HYPED HYPED HYPED going into the Belmont, and then lose. . .Funny Cide, Smarty Jones, War Emblem(?). And, when am I going to be smart enough to figure out that a horse coming off steroids, at a long track, in the heat, with a hoof issue at 1-4 has probably created an edge in betting the rest of the field?
However, given the chances of injury etc is ANY horse ever entitled to be that short in the betting? The most famous example in Australia was Ajax beaten at 40 - 1 on (Put on $40 to win $41).
If a horse is value, back it. If you think it will win, but it is not value, have a beer and watch the race. Often the media (as Trunk says) makes a false favourite.
What I mean is, even if Big Brown lost and you had backed every other horse, you might not make a profit.
OK, in this case, because Big Brown was such a heavy favourite, the other horses’ prices would all have been uqite long and chances are you would still have profited, but my point is that in a more even race, backing all except one horse would likely not make you a profit even if the horse you didn’t back lost.
To reliably make money out of horses losing, you need to be able to lay bets, either as a bookmaker or on an exchange like Betfair.
Assume that there are true odds on a horse race (it’s not like you can run it 10,000 times and count how often each horse wins), and that the collected wisdom of the bettors in an average horse race would find those odds. If enough people are betting on the favorite with no intention of collecting, that would drive his odds below the true value[sup]*[/sup] and drive the odds of the other horses up. In any race where people are betting for the souvenir value, is it likely that the other horses become positive-value bets?
They’re not necessarily doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. A winning betting slip has a minimum value on the face of it, and they may be counting on selling it for a premium to souvenir hunters on eBay. That would effectively bring more money into the prize pool if the favorite wins.
As I noted, there are indeed speculators doing exactly that. Of course, that person STILL wants the horse to win, and go on to take the triple crown if we are talking about the Derby or Preakness. EBay has really tightened up the cycle on items deemed “collectible”, as well as bringing more people into the game. I found an article from before Smarty Jones’ Belmont attempt estimating that if he won, Smarty Jones $2 tickets, expected to pay off about $2.10, would go for about $25 the day after, dropping to about half that when people found a lot of them available. Derby and Preakness tickets would have fetched more. Apparently, winning tickets on Secretariat from the 1973 Kentucky Derby go for about $300-400 in mint condition.
