In my previous post I was whining about hitting the all Dirt pick 4 and losing money in the process. Having given some thought to this, I realize that I have no one but myself to blame. Like so many horseplayers, there was nothing wrong with my handicapping- but my poor money management caused the loss.
While the all Dirt pick 4 was a gimmicky type of bet that you only find at the BC, it was still a multi-race bet and should have been attacked as such. In making my bet, I went 2x3x5x5. In the final two legs, my error was to play at equal strength (the $1 base bet) both horses that I liked a lot and horses that I thought had a realistic chance to win if my top horses didn't fire. That caused me to create a single ticket that was too expensive if my preferred horses won, which they did.
In hindsight, I should have tried to rank the horses in the final two legs based on how I viewed their merits. Then, I should have played not a single $1 ticket, but several different tickets. A possibility would have been a $2 ticket using my top picks, a $1 that used the top picks in three of the legs and my other possibles in the other leg, and a $0.50 ticket that used the other possibles in both of the final two legs. (I think that in the first two legs, I mostly liked the picks almost equally so didn't need to differentiate - it just happens that the favorite won each, but the others were solid also). I think that this would have allowed me to remain within the ROI budget but have a wager that more closely reflected how I felt the races would turn out. (I won't bore you by listing exactly what the wagers would look like, but I hope you get the idea).
It's easy to be a Sunday morning quarterback, but the simple fact was that I didn't like Saudi Crown as much as I liked White Abarrio or Ushba, and yet my wager on him was equal. That's just not a good way to use one's money.
I've said before that I love our ROI contest because it allows us to try various types of wagers and learn about this fascinating game that we play.
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