9 ms·

My journey applying AI to horse racing

100 points by surfsvammel 8y ago

pidu87 8y ago
All in! You can't lose. Bet your house!
LoSboccacc 8y ago
> The last results, after remodeling the problem, came to be on par with the odds themselves. Around 37%. This time my AI was as good as consensus at betting harness racing. using the same dataset as betters with a NN is not really better than running a regression on it, so this doesn't really surprise me. nn are able to find patterns with things others than historical series. taking this forward would need to combine historical race sets external sources that could have correlated information available that's not easy to extract by simple regression, like news and articles whenever available or meteorological data or whatever, just feed it everything and let the nn sort itself the useless data out
- surfsvammel 8y ago
  That’s in fact what was done. Facts about the races (everything except for the actual odds for the horses) combined with Google Maps API. It basically predicted the odds of the horses (more or less).
Animats 8y ago
He has this completely wrong. The idea in pare-mutuel betting is not to pick the winner. The favorite usually wins, but the house cut makes betting the favorite a net lose. The goal is to find underpriced bets, where the collective estimate of the odds is far from the prediction systems's estimate.
- surfsvammel 8y ago
  That’s all good. If an algorithm can predict the odds then you can compare the odds of the algorithm to those give by the bookies and voila, there you’ll find you under priced bets. Picking the favourite to win is a measure of how well the algorithm is at predicting the odds.
- sorokod 8y ago
  In this case there is no house. For this to work a player needs to be able to back or lay an outcome. "In harness racing, you are playing against all the other players. You are not playing the house. The odds of any given horse winning is directly related to the amount of money on it."
  - LiamPa 8y ago
    Betfair / any exchange allows you to back/lay. He seems to be ignoring the overround which is effectively the house and then commission when you are banned and have to resort to the exchanges.
  - scottlocklin 8y ago
    I'm pretty sure these races are pari-mutuel where the house takes a vigorish. The sentence you give is basically the definition of pari-mutuel without the vig. FWIIW the author is wrong that this problem is unstudied. There are actual hedge funds which do nothing but this and a quick google search provides numerous academic examples; even a github repo. "Deep learning" is probably the worst approach I can think of to the problem. I'm also guessing he misunderstood the data if betting on the favorite compounds like that. If you make the race pay off at something other than the actual odds, that would probably do it. Examples from the literature: https://github.com/dominicplouffe/HorseRacingPrediction https://github.com/dominicplouffe/HorseRacingPrediction https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016792361200379X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016792361...
    - surfsvammel 8y ago
      It doesn’t say that horse racing is understudied. It is saying that harness racing is understudied. Normal horse racing is very different to harness racing. Also. The simulated betting on on the favourite on those 26000 races was with one dollar per race. If the favourite win, the balance increases with 1$*the odds. If the favourite does not win, the balance decreases with 1$. Nothing strange about it, and as I tried to explained, no compounding involved. Flat betting. 1 $ per race. Anyway. It was simulated on historic data and also a side note as it didn’t really have anything to do with the project itself. Appreciate the comment.
- michaelscott 8y ago
  Exactly this. You also need to ensure that the underpriced bet actually wins or, if your strategy allows for it, places in the top 3. The odds on a place are generally too low to make this worth it though.
  - LiamPa 8y ago
    Value is value, doesn’t matter if it wins, its all a numbers game.
    - michaelscott 8y ago
      There's no payout if the horse doesn't win. It doesn't operate like the stock market.
      - retsibsi 8y ago
        He/she just means that if a bet is genuinely underpriced, the expected value of taking it will be positive. (So if you can reliably find these bets, you'll profit in the long run.) The odds reflect the horse's supposed chance of winning or placing (or whatever else it takes to get a payout), not its expected position -- so this isn't a case where you can be aware that the horse is underrated, but have no way to make a +EV bet on that knowledge.
        LiamPa 8y ago
        Exactly, for example yesterday I placed over 5000 bets, not all of them won but as far as my strategies were concerned they were value and should therefore be in profit over the long term.
        michaelscott 8y ago
        Yeah over the long term, but I thought this was already implied. All I'm saying is that "beating" other bettors is not enough to ensure success because of the means by which payouts are made. I suspect you feel this is also implied though, so I think we're probably on the same page.
- kyleblarson 8y ago
  I agree. The degenerate gambler in me doesn't get much pleasure out of betting on the favorite and winning when they go off at 2/5. IMO it's much more satisfying to box an exacta or trifecta including the favorite and some less favored horses and hit that.
- retsibsi 8y ago
  > The idea in pare-mutuel betting is not to pick the winner. The favorite usually wins, but the house cut makes betting the favorite a net lose. Isn't this a misstatement in the other direction? Favourites can be underrated too. They're probably not, or at least not enough for you to beat the house cut, but that's true of every bet -- they're all likely to be net losers unless you have special information, or a special way of using it.
jedberg 8y ago
This is another case where being rich lets you get richer. :) I had a friend who had a private box at a horse track. One of the benefits of this box was that you had a personal betting machine. This let you bet on the best odds just seconds before the race every time. I made a lot of money doing that. You can kind of do it in Vegas too because the sports books aren't usually that busy. In fact, that hardest part of this strategy is actually figuring out who the favorite is! The odds are usually listed as fractions, but they have different denominators, so you quickly have to convert them all the the LCD and then order them. But yes, the closer you bet to post time, the better your outcome with this strategy will be.
- LiamPa 8y ago
  The closer to the off the more accurate the price is (wisdom of the crowd) thus less value, you need to know something others don’t to win long term from taking the starting price! I assume you are American as everyone in the UK has a personal betting machine and it’s in their pocket.
  - drcross 8y ago
    Jedberg is America. Americans typically don't understand the rule to gambling because they haven't grown up with them, it shows here.
  - CamTin 8y ago
    Not sure how it works elsewhere but horse betting in the US is almost always parimutuel, meaning that everybody gets the post odds, regardless of when they bought their ticket. In other words, betting early doesn't give any advantage and in fact the later you can wait, the more accurate an idea you have of the actual payout odds of your bet. Thus, having access to a private betting machine, and not having to elbow other gamblers to buy a ticket at the last minute, is a real advantage. That said, the state's take-out is so high in most states that you need a massive edge to actually make money. The slight edge a private betting machine would bring probably isn't enough.
    - 8y ago
yeahwhatever10 8y ago
Interesting comparison to the old fashioned way: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-03/the-gambler-who-cracked-the-horse-racing-code https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-03/the-gambl...
EGreg 8y ago
I found this nugget to be the most valuable: Simulated flat betting 1$ on 26 000 races over 15 years shows a hefty return on investment If this is true, why don’t we all just go and hire people in Sweden to put in bets for us at the last minute, based on the favorite horse, and pay them out of the profits? We pay them to do it and we collect the winnings. If this strategy works it may work elsewhere too. Why not just do that all day long with an army of people? And you aren’t hurting who is the favorite either.
- stefs 8y ago
  well, for once, just because it works it doesn't mean it's worth it. a couple of years ago i read a story about a man who cracked a scratch-off lottery ticket code (the serial numbers were biased). he could have earned more than with his day job if he devoted his time fully to gaming the system, but ... it decided it wasn't good enough - a mindless, robotic task, ending in misery soon. the take away of the story was that the method was probably known by crime syndicates and used for money laundering, as they have cheap pseudo-slave labour available. but if you're a well educated person with a fulfulling job, you'd go insane soon (and of course, job security - the second the company changes their system you're out). so with betting, you'd have to invest a lot of time and energy for it to become profitable. as he wrote, you'd have to be at the race tracks and wait until the last possible moment, then driving to the next stadium. and if it was _that_ easy to create a real winning system that depended on local help, the swedes would do it themselves - so your hired goons might stay as long as they needed to understand your system and then continue on their own (lowering your margins in the process). if the process could be completely automated, i.e. with online betting, the story might be different. but i'm sure there are already a lot of syndicates looking into that (even the analog version). for them it doesn't even have to be profitable. 80% return is good enough for money laundering and they can out-finance the legal competition.
  - EGreg 8y ago
    But why drive? Just hire some low-income 19 year old Swedes to do it. They don’t have the capital to deploy. The same could be said of any software you right... your developers don’t have the capital to get that userbase.
brootstrap 8y ago
appreciate the write up but is this even AI? It seems like he just did some analysis & stats on observed data, and came up with a simple model.
- surfsvammel 8y ago
  The article doesn’t really say, as this was a write up of a 20min talk at a conference for economists. The main model where vanilla ANNs. Also SVMs and LSTMs where tested but unsuccessfully. As I had a lot prior experience writing Java, most models where implemented in the beginning in DeepLearning4J but was in the later stages moved over to the frameworks from Fast.ai. I’d be happy to do a write up of the details at some point. The majority of work was in fact the data pre-processing.
  - brootstrap 8y ago
    Ah, no need to give me all the details good sir. Appreciate the post. Also yeah, sounds about right with the pre-processing. That is always the case!
gorkish 8y ago
Using computers to beat masses of the general public at horseracing in this fashion has been going on for well over 30 years. I first read articles about the gambling teams and data scientists behind them in Hong Kong in the mid 90's. The teams had data capture people entering realtime odds from the tracks at Sha Tin and Happy Valley and hired private tellers to enter thousands of computed bets moments before a race began from their offtrack locations in downtown HK highrises. The thing that makes it easy to simulate but impractical to execute is that getting enough bets in fast enough and late enough to tip the odds to your favor to give you an edge while limiting losses is difficult to do. It's even harder to do without this wagering itself affecting the odds. For one there often just isn't enough money wagered on a race. In the heyday of the HK races you'd often have 100 million+ HKD wagered on every single race, much of that coming from the general population -- individuals going to the track. There are only a few big event races in the US or Europe that will attract that kind of betting pool. Even HK is no longer like that.
- brisance 8y ago
  Bloomberg had an article on this, last year. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-03/the-gambler-who-cracked-the-horse-racing-code https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-03/the-gambl...
slm_HN 8y ago
He was unlucky in picking harness racing. Standard horse racing is already corrupt, but harness racing takes it to the next level. The rules and the addition of the harness make cheating much more prevalent. I'd rather bet on Professional Wrastling than harness racing.
shaunray 8y ago
Actually the most successful parimutuel syndicates and HNWI bet programmatically through API’s. They consistently win and they do not make their money from picking a single winner. They bet on exotic bets that have much higher odds and are easier to box. For instance picking two winners or order of the first three horses. Source: I worked on those APIs to integrate with 20+ exchanges over three companies and 10 years. The syndicates and HNWIs were always the same people over that decade.
- gricardo99 8y ago
  That sounds fascinating. I don’t suppose you have a blog, or any other write up about that world? Even perhaps a link to one of these betting APIs, if they’re generally available to the public?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - shaunray 8y ago
    Betfair has a public API, but they are not parimutuel: https://docs.developer.betfair.com/display/1smk3cen4v3lu3yomq5qye0ni/API+Overview https://docs.developer.betfair.com/display/1smk3cen4v3lu3yom... Tabcorp is an Australian Wagering Company that offers real-time horse racing APIs: https://studio.tab.com.au/ https://studio.tab.com.au/ Others are a little less public and you need to sign up with an account and prove you are a syndicate. Hong Kong Jockey Club, UniBet, Amtote. I don't normally talk about this history as I was active in this industry until four years ago. There are however people who have come out in public: Bill Benter: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-03/the-gambler-who-cracked-the-horse-racing-code https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-03/the-gambl... Jelko: https://www.smh.com.au/national/meet-the-joker-the-australian-who-is-the-biggest-gambler-in-the-world-20180515-p4zfhi.html https://www.smh.com.au/national/meet-the-joker-the-australia... Most of the other families and players are extremely private or are of Eastern European I wont talk about them publicly. This is a list of common bet types that are targets for these types of players: - Trifecta - Big Six - Quadrella - First 4 Here is a blog on working the combinations of the Big Six: https://practicalpunting.com.au/pp-online/a-z-of-betting/exotic-betting/big-six/my-formula-to-beat-the-big-6-20090404 https://practicalpunting.com.au/pp-online/a-z-of-betting/exo...
malbs 8y ago
Here's my 2 cents. Anyone who is telling you they have cracked the parimutuel pools, and "here's how to do it", is trying to sell you something else. Anyone who has actually cracked the parimutuel pools knows how they work, and that if you share your "tips", or selections, you only serve to diminish your own returns, so you are not going to do it.
- mimixco 8y ago
  Indeed. This is the origin of the expression "break a leg." At the track, you could never wish someone else good luck because their good luck will cost you money. Instead, you wish their horse breaks a leg so he'll be eliminated, moving the money in his pool to yours if you win.
mimixco 8y ago
The OP writes repeatedly that the "odds of winning are related to the amount bet on each horse." This is not correct. The payout is related to the number of people betting. The odds of winning are based on the horse's DNA, training, competitors, etc. The horse does not know who bet it on it while it's running. It's easy to confuse the word "odds" in gambling because that often refers to payout, but these are not the odds of winning.

100 points by surfsvammel 8y ago

All in! You can't lose. Bet your house!

> The last results, after remodeling the problem, came to be on par with the odds themselves. Around 37%. This time my AI was as good as consensus at betting harness racing. using the same dataset as betters with a NN is not really better than running a regression on it, so this doesn't really surprise me. nn are able to find patterns with things others than historical series. taking this forward would need to combine historical race sets external sources that could have correlated information available that's not easy to extract by simple regression, like news and articles whenever available or meteorological data or whatever, just feed it everything and let the nn sort itself the useless data out

surfsvammel 8y ago
That’s in fact what was done. Facts about the races (everything except for the actual odds for the horses) combined with Google Maps API. It basically predicted the odds of the horses (more or less).

Animats 8y ago

He has this completely wrong. The idea in pare-mutuel betting is not to pick the winner. The favorite usually wins, but the house cut makes betting the favorite a net lose. The goal is to find underpriced bets, where the collective estimate of the odds is far from the prediction systems's estimate.

surfsvammel 8y ago
That’s all good. If an algorithm can predict the odds then you can compare the odds of the algorithm to those give by the bookies and voila, there you’ll find you under priced bets. Picking the favourite to win is a measure of how well the algorithm is at predicting the odds.
sorokod 8y ago
In this case there is no house. For this to work a player needs to be able to back or lay an outcome. "In harness racing, you are playing against all the other players. You are not playing the house. The odds of any given horse winning is directly related to the amount of money on it."
- LiamPa 8y ago
  Betfair / any exchange allows you to back/lay. He seems to be ignoring the overround which is effectively the house and then commission when you are banned and have to resort to the exchanges.
- scottlocklin 8y ago
  I'm pretty sure these races are pari-mutuel where the house takes a vigorish. The sentence you give is basically the definition of pari-mutuel without the vig. FWIIW the author is wrong that this problem is unstudied. There are actual hedge funds which do nothing but this and a quick google search provides numerous academic examples; even a github repo. "Deep learning" is probably the worst approach I can think of to the problem. I'm also guessing he misunderstood the data if betting on the favorite compounds like that. If you make the race pay off at something other than the actual odds, that would probably do it. Examples from the literature: https://github.com/dominicplouffe/HorseRacingPrediction https://github.com/dominicplouffe/HorseRacingPrediction https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016792361200379X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016792361...
  - surfsvammel 8y ago
    It doesn’t say that horse racing is understudied. It is saying that harness racing is understudied. Normal horse racing is very different to harness racing. Also. The simulated betting on on the favourite on those 26000 races was with one dollar per race. If the favourite win, the balance increases with 1$*the odds. If the favourite does not win, the balance decreases with 1$. Nothing strange about it, and as I tried to explained, no compounding involved. Flat betting. 1 $ per race. Anyway. It was simulated on historic data and also a side note as it didn’t really have anything to do with the project itself. Appreciate the comment.
michaelscott 8y ago
Exactly this. You also need to ensure that the underpriced bet actually wins or, if your strategy allows for it, places in the top 3. The odds on a place are generally too low to make this worth it though.
- LiamPa 8y ago
  Value is value, doesn’t matter if it wins, its all a numbers game.
  - michaelscott 8y ago
    There's no payout if the horse doesn't win. It doesn't operate like the stock market.
    - retsibsi 8y ago
      He/she just means that if a bet is genuinely underpriced, the expected value of taking it will be positive. (So if you can reliably find these bets, you'll profit in the long run.) The odds reflect the horse's supposed chance of winning or placing (or whatever else it takes to get a payout), not its expected position -- so this isn't a case where you can be aware that the horse is underrated, but have no way to make a +EV bet on that knowledge.
      - LiamPa 8y ago
        Exactly, for example yesterday I placed over 5000 bets, not all of them won but as far as my strategies were concerned they were value and should therefore be in profit over the long term.
      - michaelscott 8y ago
        Yeah over the long term, but I thought this was already implied. All I'm saying is that "beating" other bettors is not enough to ensure success because of the means by which payouts are made. I suspect you feel this is also implied though, so I think we're probably on the same page.
kyleblarson 8y ago
I agree. The degenerate gambler in me doesn't get much pleasure out of betting on the favorite and winning when they go off at 2/5. IMO it's much more satisfying to box an exacta or trifecta including the favorite and some less favored horses and hit that.
retsibsi 8y ago
> The idea in pare-mutuel betting is not to pick the winner. The favorite usually wins, but the house cut makes betting the favorite a net lose. Isn't this a misstatement in the other direction? Favourites can be underrated too. They're probably not, or at least not enough for you to beat the house cut, but that's true of every bet -- they're all likely to be net losers unless you have special information, or a special way of using it.

jedberg 8y ago

This is another case where being rich lets you get richer. :) I had a friend who had a private box at a horse track. One of the benefits of this box was that you had a personal betting machine. This let you bet on the best odds just seconds before the race every time. I made a lot of money doing that. You can kind of do it in Vegas too because the sports books aren't usually that busy. In fact, that hardest part of this strategy is actually figuring out who the favorite is! The odds are usually listed as fractions, but they have different denominators, so you quickly have to convert them all the the LCD and then order them. But yes, the closer you bet to post time, the better your outcome with this strategy will be.

LiamPa 8y ago
The closer to the off the more accurate the price is (wisdom of the crowd) thus less value, you need to know something others don’t to win long term from taking the starting price! I assume you are American as everyone in the UK has a personal betting machine and it’s in their pocket.
- drcross 8y ago
  Jedberg is America. Americans typically don't understand the rule to gambling because they haven't grown up with them, it shows here.
- CamTin 8y ago
  Not sure how it works elsewhere but horse betting in the US is almost always parimutuel, meaning that everybody gets the post odds, regardless of when they bought their ticket. In other words, betting early doesn't give any advantage and in fact the later you can wait, the more accurate an idea you have of the actual payout odds of your bet. Thus, having access to a private betting machine, and not having to elbow other gamblers to buy a ticket at the last minute, is a real advantage. That said, the state's take-out is so high in most states that you need a massive edge to actually make money. The slight edge a private betting machine would bring probably isn't enough.
  - 8y ago

yeahwhatever10 8y ago

Interesting comparison to the old fashioned way: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-03/the-gambler-who-cracked-the-horse-racing-code https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-03/the-gambl...

EGreg 8y ago

I found this nugget to be the most valuable: Simulated flat betting 1$ on 26 000 races over 15 years shows a hefty return on investment If this is true, why don’t we all just go and hire people in Sweden to put in bets for us at the last minute, based on the favorite horse, and pay them out of the profits? We pay them to do it and we collect the winnings. If this strategy works it may work elsewhere too. Why not just do that all day long with an army of people? And you aren’t hurting who is the favorite either.

stefs 8y ago
well, for once, just because it works it doesn't mean it's worth it. a couple of years ago i read a story about a man who cracked a scratch-off lottery ticket code (the serial numbers were biased). he could have earned more than with his day job if he devoted his time fully to gaming the system, but ... it decided it wasn't good enough - a mindless, robotic task, ending in misery soon. the take away of the story was that the method was probably known by crime syndicates and used for money laundering, as they have cheap pseudo-slave labour available. but if you're a well educated person with a fulfulling job, you'd go insane soon (and of course, job security - the second the company changes their system you're out). so with betting, you'd have to invest a lot of time and energy for it to become profitable. as he wrote, you'd have to be at the race tracks and wait until the last possible moment, then driving to the next stadium. and if it was _that_ easy to create a real winning system that depended on local help, the swedes would do it themselves - so your hired goons might stay as long as they needed to understand your system and then continue on their own (lowering your margins in the process). if the process could be completely automated, i.e. with online betting, the story might be different. but i'm sure there are already a lot of syndicates looking into that (even the analog version). for them it doesn't even have to be profitable. 80% return is good enough for money laundering and they can out-finance the legal competition.
- EGreg 8y ago
  But why drive? Just hire some low-income 19 year old Swedes to do it. They don’t have the capital to deploy. The same could be said of any software you right... your developers don’t have the capital to get that userbase.

brootstrap 8y ago

appreciate the write up but is this even AI? It seems like he just did some analysis & stats on observed data, and came up with a simple model.

surfsvammel 8y ago
The article doesn’t really say, as this was a write up of a 20min talk at a conference for economists. The main model where vanilla ANNs. Also SVMs and LSTMs where tested but unsuccessfully. As I had a lot prior experience writing Java, most models where implemented in the beginning in DeepLearning4J but was in the later stages moved over to the frameworks from Fast.ai. I’d be happy to do a write up of the details at some point. The majority of work was in fact the data pre-processing.
- brootstrap 8y ago
  Ah, no need to give me all the details good sir. Appreciate the post. Also yeah, sounds about right with the pre-processing. That is always the case!

gorkish 8y ago

Using computers to beat masses of the general public at horseracing in this fashion has been going on for well over 30 years. I first read articles about the gambling teams and data scientists behind them in Hong Kong in the mid 90's. The teams had data capture people entering realtime odds from the tracks at Sha Tin and Happy Valley and hired private tellers to enter thousands of computed bets moments before a race began from their offtrack locations in downtown HK highrises. The thing that makes it easy to simulate but impractical to execute is that getting enough bets in fast enough and late enough to tip the odds to your favor to give you an edge while limiting losses is difficult to do. It's even harder to do without this wagering itself affecting the odds. For one there often just isn't enough money wagered on a race. In the heyday of the HK races you'd often have 100 million+ HKD wagered on every single race, much of that coming from the general population -- individuals going to the track. There are only a few big event races in the US or Europe that will attract that kind of betting pool. Even HK is no longer like that.

brisance 8y ago
Bloomberg had an article on this, last year. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-03/the-gambler-who-cracked-the-horse-racing-code https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-03/the-gambl...

slm_HN 8y ago

He was unlucky in picking harness racing. Standard horse racing is already corrupt, but harness racing takes it to the next level. The rules and the addition of the harness make cheating much more prevalent. I'd rather bet on Professional Wrastling than harness racing.

shaunray 8y ago

Actually the most successful parimutuel syndicates and HNWI bet programmatically through API’s. They consistently win and they do not make their money from picking a single winner. They bet on exotic bets that have much higher odds and are easier to box. For instance picking two winners or order of the first three horses. Source: I worked on those APIs to integrate with 20+ exchanges over three companies and 10 years. The syndicates and HNWIs were always the same people over that decade.

gricardo99 8y ago
That sounds fascinating. I don’t suppose you have a blog, or any other write up about that world? Even perhaps a link to one of these betting APIs, if they’re generally available to the public?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- shaunray 8y ago
  Betfair has a public API, but they are not parimutuel: https://docs.developer.betfair.com/display/1smk3cen4v3lu3yomq5qye0ni/API+Overview https://docs.developer.betfair.com/display/1smk3cen4v3lu3yom... Tabcorp is an Australian Wagering Company that offers real-time horse racing APIs: https://studio.tab.com.au/ https://studio.tab.com.au/ Others are a little less public and you need to sign up with an account and prove you are a syndicate. Hong Kong Jockey Club, UniBet, Amtote. I don't normally talk about this history as I was active in this industry until four years ago. There are however people who have come out in public: Bill Benter: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-03/the-gambler-who-cracked-the-horse-racing-code https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-03/the-gambl... Jelko: https://www.smh.com.au/national/meet-the-joker-the-australian-who-is-the-biggest-gambler-in-the-world-20180515-p4zfhi.html https://www.smh.com.au/national/meet-the-joker-the-australia... Most of the other families and players are extremely private or are of Eastern European I wont talk about them publicly. This is a list of common bet types that are targets for these types of players: - Trifecta - Big Six - Quadrella - First 4 Here is a blog on working the combinations of the Big Six: https://practicalpunting.com.au/pp-online/a-z-of-betting/exotic-betting/big-six/my-formula-to-beat-the-big-6-20090404 https://practicalpunting.com.au/pp-online/a-z-of-betting/exo...

malbs 8y ago

Here's my 2 cents. Anyone who is telling you they have cracked the parimutuel pools, and "here's how to do it", is trying to sell you something else. Anyone who has actually cracked the parimutuel pools knows how they work, and that if you share your "tips", or selections, you only serve to diminish your own returns, so you are not going to do it.

mimixco 8y ago
Indeed. This is the origin of the expression "break a leg." At the track, you could never wish someone else good luck because their good luck will cost you money. Instead, you wish their horse breaks a leg so he'll be eliminated, moving the money in his pool to yours if you win.

mimixco 8y ago

The OP writes repeatedly that the "odds of winning are related to the amount bet on each horse." This is not correct. The payout is related to the number of people betting. The odds of winning are based on the horse's DNA, training, competitors, etc. The horse does not know who bet it on it while it's running. It's easy to confuse the word "odds" in gambling because that often refers to payout, but these are not the odds of winning.