HANDICAPPING THE PUBLIC PART SIX "LONG SHOTS"

Alive to five of them in the finale of a big multi race wager score, only horse that can beat me today is that longshot, and then he does. We’ve all been there, and surely will visit there again sometime, but picking those long shots can be so much more fun than getting beat by them, trust me.

Generally speaking I find that most races you can go back and look at them after the race and the winner wasn’t really as impossible as they looked originally. Rather than complaining about the horse that beats you like most gamblers do, the serious handicappers try to figure out how they let a horse like that beat them so that it doesn’t happen again. Rarely does a horse win that had zero chance of winning on paper, visually, or for any other reason. I wouldn’t have bet Moreno on Whitney Day if Eric Giullot walked up to me before the race and said he can’t lose, no matter what. But that doesn’t mean that horse was impossible, he was far from impossible.

Long shots are often dismissed by the public as a whole, mainly in multi race sequences and that leads to bigger priced payouts than what you may actually get in the race itself. I always tell people, if you like a longshot, key him all the way through, use as many as you need even if it’s the all button in 3rd for exotics, you’d hate for him to win at big odds and still be wrong. The most common mistake I see is people like a longshot but don’t be WP on them when it’s by far the best wager because you don’t have to be right about any other horses in the race, so the probability of being right is much greater than it would be to play the horse in the superfecta or other exotics. I’m a strong believer in exotics and I often key my top horses at big prices all the way through 1st 2nd and 3rd, because I realize that a 12-1 doesn’t have to win to blow up the exotics because they are often bigger prices in those pools. Same thing goes with multi race pools, if you like a long shot and Double/Pick 3s are offered in the race, single him, and spread elsewhere.

Finding a long shot that has a chance can be difficult but not as difficult as most people make it out to be. Generally speaking, most long shots occur in races where the public has deemed a horse unbeatable which we all already know isn’t the case. To use a recent example, Father Patrick came back to silence the critics somewhat at Tioga Downs over the weekend after the mishap in the Hambletonian as the heavy odds on choice. He was going to win by so much that they didn’t allow show wagering, or place wagering on the race. But forgetting that horses aren’t machines, and that even the best drivers make mistakes too, Gingras set the cruise button when he made the front end, and he never thought he’d be challenged. When perfect trip given and 5/8 oval lover Datsyuk rolled off the far turn and sniffed the leader on a relaxed lead, the race was over and the 1-9 public choice couldn’t get out of cruise and on the accelerator before the wire resulting in what people would consider an impossible long shot to have. On paper, it was a 1 and 1/2 horse race, Father Patrick, and if something crazy happened, Datsyuk. The discrepancy in price? $2.10 to WIN would have been the former champion, $52 to WIN is what Datsyuk paid. The odds were the only thing making him a long shot, not accurate of his chance of winning that was much higher than every other horse in the field on paper.

Often times when I pick a long shot, it has more to do with the other horses in the race, rather than the horse I’m using itself. I don’t generally pick long shots, I’m more of a realistic dreamer, but some horses are too good to pass up on because of the horses they are facing combined with the price itself. The public generally dismisses long shots so they aren’t as tough to come up with as most would assume, but rather not examined in the same manner as the horses they prefer to wager on. Many things can create long shots, but most of them result in a change of some sort, or sometimes a multitude of changes all at once. The most common changes include class, track, distance, or surface. Often times the public in order to maintain being right about prior opinions, dismiss a horse. Recent example of that was Waco (wasn’t really a “long shot” by post time) who came back for the 2nd time ever sprinting on fast dirt, and miraculously did the same thing he did the first time he caught fast dirt, ran well. When it happened the first time, the public had screamed that an inside bias was the reason why, so this time they dismissed him again after he bested his “figure” by who knows how many points. Much to the surprise of them, when he caught the same fast dirt track that produced his best race ever in his previous start, he repeated the effort, this time as the lone speed in the race, but they still passed on him. Long shots just like vulnerable favorites, are created by the public.

The most common angle I use for finding long shots are horses dropping in class, and no, not those crazy Saratoga class drops that result in 4-5 shots, but rather hidden class drops. The public loves to ignore the fact that horses racing in open company dropping to races restricted to state-breds is a much easier spot, so they take the recent form and toss the horse. Surface and distance changes are just as common, sometimes horses bred to route on turf often start as 2YO on the dirt sprinting because they need to get them in a race, and then when they run poorly they ignore that he may not have liked the surface or distance. All of these changes are not very difficult to find if you keep an open mind and do your homework and rather than looking at what the horses have done, look for what the horses haven’t done. I don’t know who came up with this idea that trainers and owners put their horses in races because they think they will lose at big odds, but it’s a horrible concept.

I’m not a fan of betting long shots over and over throughout a card because we know they don’t win enough of the time. Somebody once tried to explain to me that because you only have to be right a smaller % of the time if you play long shots all the time you are better off in the long run. I tend to disagree with that thinking, but agree with the logic. I obviously understand that being right with bigger priced horses is much more profitable and you don’t have to be right as often. But the idea that you should play 100% of longshots and hope to hit 10% is pretty crazy. Why not just play 10% of longshots and hope to be right 100% of the time?

Long shots often have that look to them that is just awful on paper, but they tend to be dirtied up, and most of all are making significant changes that the trainer/owner have projected to work, and decided to try. Ignoring these horses because of the ML odds is a horrible way to approach a race or multi race sequence. Just because the horse is most likely to win on paper, doesn’t make him the most likely horse to cash a ticket, and more importantly turn a profit. I always tell people, I don’t care if the horse I think is going to win wins, just whether or not my wager comes in. I get lots of criticism from people because I key long shots in exotics rather than the most likely winner making it look like I’m just hedging against myself. I also get lots of criticism from people that say why is that horse on your Pick 4 ticket but not in your top 4 choices? Those people simply don’t understand that wagering isn’t the same thing as handicapping, they are gamblers, not investors. There is a reason why stock market investors have recently turned to “investing” into things that most people view as gambling. They understand that there opinions don’t matter, the only thing that matters is profiting, and being against the general opinions of the public, the opinions that lose over time and keep sports books open. The best bettors of sports and horse racing can sacrifice personal opinions in order to turn a profit, the rest of the world that wants to be right will continue to go broke. As long as I’m in this game, I’ll continue to handicap the public when they say this horse can’t lose, and use my logic of what may happen when he does, and perhaps I’ll find that next long shot.

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#partsix