A strange win bet of $80,000 has been made this afternoon in the Preakness on a horse named Stradivari. This bet plummets Stradivari’s odds from 8-1 all the way down to 3-5 and makes him the favorite over undefeated Kentucky Derby winner Nyquist at 4-5. There is still time before the Preakness is run at Pimlico, so odds could change substantially again. But being so close to the big race, the second leg of the Triple Crown with the Belmont in June being the third leg, the vast majority of money to be bet has been bet.
Let me explain why this bet is, well, stupid. It’s a stupid bet not because Stradivari won’t win. He could win. It’s a stupid bet because whoever made it just killed his ROI. Why? Before this bet was made, Stradivari was about 8-1, where his odds pretty much should have been. Some liked him but the horse everyone was paying attention to, rightfully so, was Nyquist. Now, when you make an $80,000 win bet on a horse, dropping the horse’s odds to 3-5, you alert the world about your horse. You kill your win price and you drastically hurt prices on the exotic bets, such as exactas and trifectas.
What should this gambler have done with his/her $80,000? First, place multiple-race bets that began before but include the Preakness in the sequence. When you have an 8-1 win in a multi-race bet, it doesn’t just increase the payout over what it would have been with the favorite, it exponentially increases the payout, likely somewhere in the vicinity of 10 times the payout! Plus, and this is a huge benefit, no one sees potential payouts until the next race up is the Preakness. At that point, those prices are locked in.
Second, this gambler should have placed a healthy amount of money on Stradivari in the 1st position in trifectas and superfectas. This is because the probable payouts aren’t displayed anywhere. This is no grand conspiracy of secrecy. There are simply way too many combinations to display. So this gives our gambler the opportunity to still bet his/her horse to win, but without tipping his/her hand, thus maintaining a strong ROI should the horse win.
Lastly, I would slowly, and in relatively modest amounts, bet Stradivari in exacta and win bets. If a horse is 8-1 with tens of millions of dollars in the pool, you can periodically place $1,000 bets that won’t noticeably change the odds, thus avoiding bringing attention to your horse. The same is true for exactas. Bet reasonable amounts periodically such as $50 exactas and our gambler’s bets will not be noticed and keep the payouts high.