BC in Coal Cracker Country

[brokerstip]

In golf the saying goes,
\"They don\'t ask how...just how many.\"
Racing is similiar.
 A lot of great ballstrikers can\'t score and a lot of great handicappers can\'t cash.

There I was SAT...Carbondale Pa.....me with my TG\'s surrounded by Raggie players.
No one bright enough to toss Sightseek (pass race for me) but I did lead an OTB chorus of \"Let\'s Toss Frankel\" post race. This chorus was repeated with each failure.

One friend keys Cajun in sprint...has a corornary when he hits the lead and is redfaced and shaking like the Exorcist as he hits wire. Then he screams,  \"Where are all the other horses who are supposed to run\" as bleepin Blues tags the 2nd slot.
No win money and no cash.....Ouch!
Last I saw him he was muttering something about Hari-Kari in the first at Charlestown...lol

The wily veteran of the group was pulling his hair out until the Turf Classic. Apparently Lenny had said HC was best in his opinion. So he hooked up HC with Tinman, Johar and Flabrav in the tri and super. (I did read him the favorable JB comments on both those price horses) Result: a   multiple hit and a 5 figure cash!! Hot Wings on the house!!

the moral of the story is that brilliant handicapping (and I know many folk who are extremely knowledgeable about all facets of the game)alone doesn\'t cut it.
One needs to be able fashion a betting strategy ......
We all know that and I am not trying to be a MOTO (master of the obvious)

I would be interested in hearing a few betting concepts and betting approaches to different types of situations:
i.e false favorite
    pick 3, 4 and 6 strategies
    place betting versus the exacta as a place bet

etc. etc.

Or just general betting concepts. Think we might be able to give each other some insights and ideas.

Regards
Tip
 
I was a BC loser myself and minimized the damage via the early BEL card (Goldberg and K MC.) plus the late three SA races (Norman Cole take a bow).

[Mall]

I think your questions regarding betting strategy are important, but as I see it there are very few general guidelines, & most of them do not apply to the BC. However, it was still interesting to learn, courtesy of Equidaily, that there are 2 mechanical approaches which have produced a significant flat bet BC profit over the last 5 yrs. The 1st(30%roi) was making a bet on every horse in every BC race. The 2nd(80%roi) was making a bet on every horse that went off at odds of 20-1 or higher.

BC or not, I think it always makes some sense to look at the card as a whole, which on Sat lead me to think that I could make enough money from a win bet on Jerry \"King of undercard stakes on big race day\" Hollendorfer\'s horse in the 1st. Good thing I wasn\'t at a track where on course bookmakers offer a price on who won the photo. That race, together with the next 2, completely drained my off course acct, which is  why I ended up in line. I had also reached the conclusion that at anything close to the ML, Cole Norman\'s horse, which you surprisingly are the only one to mention, was the best win bet of the day, & would either bail me out or take things to a higher level, so to speak, depending on how things went in the prior races. As the insightful OPM recently reminded me, intervening events & one\'s psyche can have a profound effect on one\'s betting strategy. If I had pitched a shut out to that point, easy enough to do on BC day, it would have been very difficult if not impossible to make the kind of bet I thought the horse deserved. That luckily wasn\'t the case, but what did give me pause & caused me to cut my bet considerably was the possibility that the BC detention & testing protocol applied to the race. I take it from JB\'s post that it did not, something I wish I would have known beforehand. Of course, when considering \"can\'t possibly handle firm turf HC, it  would have been nice to know, as trainer Cerin put it in a TVG interview yesterday, that track maintenance had spent 2 days softening the turf course to \"appease\" the Euros.

For non BC days, I agree with the other two basic guidelines you hear & read most often. The 1st, much easier said than done, is to construct your plays so that they actually reflect your handicapping opinion. Hence, absent info on how you view a particular race, it\'s impossible to answer the specific questions you ask. But you might want to consider whether you should even consider anyone else\'s opinion because of guideline no 2, which is that your betting strategy won\'t work unless it fits your personality & approach to the game. I wouldn\'t recommend that someone who needs frequent positive feedback adopt my everyday definition of \"spreading\", which might consist of playing an 80%-20% exacta \"box.\" In other words, how you bet the races to a certain extent depends on why you bet the races, a fundamental & difficult to answer question that many handicappers don\'t seem to have ever contemplated.