First of all I totally disagree telling this guy not to play exactas and trifectas. It appears empirially that you get more bang for your buck on these than just straight win bets. Apparently the parimutual pool is not as efficient for exotics as it is for win/place, show bets.

Anyone can study it for themselves, multiply the odds on the two exacta horses and it comes out pretty close to the win odds they went off at. But if you had bet them to win/place only the win bet would pay off at the win odds, the place bet would be worth much less.

The same reasoning is probably true for pick 3s etc, but in my opinion you have that much more info. to deal with whereas in an exotic you only have to cap one race. If you can figure out how one race will play out, then you have much less info. to parse through.

Look at the dubious logic being exuded here:

"If one cannot pick winners, one is going to have an even harder time ferreting out horses that will hit the board..."

This sounds logical but is it? (sorry to pick on Grits here). The end conclusion of Grits is that you should stick to win betting because...."you cannot pick winners."

What the hell sense does that make? It's not a question of being able to spot winners anyone can spot winners, it's how many of them you want to play and what price are you getting.

And why woud it be harded to spot a horse to hit the board than a winner? Does that make any sense? Three horees will hit the board why would it be harder to spot one out of three horses? I dont see any logic in this.

Try to be as coldly logical as possible:

The guy above who said you should stick to one track makes perfect sense. Why? Because the more tracks you are dealing with the more info. you have to sort and the more info you have to sort means you are getting closer to simply random betting, i.e. straight gambling.

THe only logical thing is to try to use as much info as possible in order to avoid making a bet that is just a simple gamble. If you had no info. at all, and you just throw mony down on any horse, that is a simple gamble. Presumably with skill you can win at this game.

This is the hope. Logically the only way then to win is to have more info, or to better analyze the info. Or both. By adding more tracks you are geting back toward total random betting or gambling.

That much makes sense.

So do exactas/ trifectas...