Hedge Bets, or plays
 

Just recently we had someone ask for help hedging his bets.


How bout some explanation of what exactly the hedge bet does, other than "Hedge" your bet.

But is this something when ones makes huge bets, as the bettor the other day was doing, or can even small bettors do it too.

These were huge bets, 5x8x2x6 = 480.00 for 1.00


But then with a few longshots, it can pay pretty good, so Hedging must become a part of your wagering strategy, but very little is written on this.


Thank you


Patrick

in wrong forum??
 

This should probally be moved, but then no one is replying anyway, so why bother,..



patrick

hey Pk i'm not to knowledgeable on hedge bets but i do place some side bets on a race to try and save if i don't hit my main bet, like a win/plc bet on a horse not in my tri or ex bet. a hedge bet is design to play all the horses left that if they win you will cash something, such as you are alive to 6 horses in the final leg of a pick 3 or 4 and you bet the last three not in your pk 3-4 to win in increments to guarantee a profit if your pk 4 fails. no matter which horse wins you either hit the pk4 or a big win bet, it's smart betting if you have a big bank roll and alive to several horses.

Patrick,

I don't normally make a hedge bet but I did a couple of weeks ago and I will tell you the scenario and my thinking. It was Preakness day and the Belmont late P4. My ticket was 4X3X1X6 $72 for $1. I had 2 $20 plus horse in along with an obvious low price single. In the last race I was alive to 6 of the 10 horses. I did not want to come this far and not cash a ticket and I was eligible for some pretty large payouts. I placed $5 win bets on the remaining four horses,all of which had odds greater than 15-1, which cost me $20. My pick 4 ticket blew up in the last leg but my hedge bet still paid about $140. This did not prevent me from going on a 30 second profanity filled rant but helped my ROI for the day.

that was a very good example of hedge betting and easy to understand thx,and glad you cashed your $140 while cussing like a sailor lol...

Patrick I think small players can to it too, but obviously not to the extent of the bigger players. I sometimes try to hedge depending on the payouts. Yesterday I did, I was live to 3 horses in the late pick 4 at Hollywood. I was worried about the last horse I threw off the ticket. I thought that if anyone was going to blow up my ticket it would be him. I bet $10 win on him and played $5 exacta's with him over my three horses. I didn't have enough money in the account to play any triples. Sure enough this horse I semi hedged with won at 9/2 (blowing up the pick 4) and one of my pick 4 horses ran second. So I ended up making some money on the sequance. So it was some relatively cheap protection on my ticket and if I would have lost the race totally it would have only cost me an extra $25 bucks.

i dont hedge on the win side ,but will make a 'B' TICKET in some cases..smaller slimmer in case a single gets beat by a mid level contender

Thank you

Gentlemen, thanks for the responses, as I was just curious on how best to possibly do this on the lower end of the financial scale.

But , always thought that hedging did not make you a winner, it just kept the lossess to a minimum, if do correctly, no??

Patrick

depends on the pay-offs of your main ticket and how much you can bet on all the remaining horses, a guaranteed pay-off but like many things,the dimininshing returns theory kicks in, i i don't know really what i'm talking about.

in 2001 i had a live pick 3 going into the bc sprint with 3 horses that had the same closing style.

i hedged squirtle squirt as the most likely front running winner and it paid $96.

don't ask why i was betting 3 horses in the last leg with the same style or why i structured pick 3 tickets 3 x 3 x 3. i think i was obsessed with the number 3. or just an idiot.

i think generally if you think you're profitable you shouldn't worry about hedging. you're probably better off making win bets on the longer priced horses in your sequence. that's also a form of hedging.

Hedging is the kind of thing that can help you keep your sanity if done in moderation/selectively, but is a slippery slope to killing your long-term profit.

Generally I only hedge in small increments and in scenarios like 3kings pointed out, i.e. the last leg of a live Pick 4/6.

A key to winning, IMO, assuming the requisite skills are there, is confidence in your ability. Strange as it may sound, I don't want any freebies in the game. Even if I lose as a result of 'bad luck', I really don't need to win because of 'good luck'. I realize, obviously, that 'luck' in racing describes common events and one cannot win without accepting it as just part of the game. I don't want any freebies because I need to be able to reproduce results in order to be successful. As such, extraordinary events (a year altering score, for example) are not something I'd rely on.

Getting back on topic, if I'm alive in the last leg of and exotic, however many numbers, and I need to bet more because I'm afraid to lose, even if within the throes of a losing streak, I really shouldn't have bet that leg as this is strong evidence that I didn't have an opinion in that race.

I'm not a big proponent of hedging, but I disagree with this. I do agree with most of what you're saying, though. Personally I'd rather bet the last leg of a PK4 or whatever the same way I would've bet it had I lost in an earlier leg, but there are certainly times when there are horses we haven't included for whatever reason that we can foresee winning enough to make a small hedge worth it or perhaps even profitable. Or, what if we have discovered a bias over the course of our sequence and now want to use the likely aided horse(s) that we didn't include originally?

I never hedge. It is an instantaneous mush of my live ticket.

I know a few guys who simply have a black cloud over their heads. If I'm alive at the end of a pic 3-4 I'll play the remaining horses for $2 bucks a piece and give the tickets to these guys. It almost always works. Of course a great deal of work went into identifying those kind of guys.

Hint they are usually playing 3-6-9 Goose Drank Wine, names of their kids or license plate numbers they saw coming into the track. That will give you a start to find these golden eggs.