Picking Winners 101: Pace with TimeFormUS
When you sit down with a one-thousand piece puzzle, there a million different ways to solve it. Technically, the answer is 1000! which is way more than a million, but you get the point. One of the most common ways to begin is with one of the corner pieces and then work around the edges.
Picking the winner of a horse race is very similar to solving a puzzle and just like a puzzle there are a million different correct ways to solve it. One popular way to begin is to look at the pace of the race. “Pace makes the race” is a common phrase muttered between those that are reading the Racing Form.
Horses develop a favorite style of running in their races. Some like to go straight to the lead, others like to sit in the middle then make a move around the turn, and others come from the way back, making a huge move on the stretch to try to steal a win. A great example of a horse that liked to run late is Rich Strike, who famously upset at over 80-1 in the 2022 Kentucky Derby. TimeFormUS.com has a great tool to project the pace of the race, which allows you to quickly determine who, and how many, horses want to go to the lead versus try to pull a Rich Strike.
Below is an excerpt from the 3rd race at the Fair Grounds in Louisiana on December 22, 2023. It’s clear that the 9 is going to want to go to the lead with the 4,6, and 7 trying to pull a Rich Strike.
It’s important to note that American dirt racing usually favors front runners, especially in “lower” level races or those that are marked as “Claiming” or “Maiden Claiming”. This 9th Race is a claiming race, which you can tell from the description in the track layout on TimeForm, shown below.
Armed with the information that the 9 should get a fairly easy lead in a lower-level dirt race, you can take a swing on the 9. Unlike sports gambling, horse racing is not fixed odds, it is parimutuel. All the win bets are pooled together, the track keeps a percentage, and the rest is split between the winners. This means you’re not betting against the house and also means that you don’t know the final odds until the horses jump out of the starting gate.
There is a person employed by the track that takes their best guess at what the final odds will be, based on a number of different factors. The 9 in this example “opened up”, aka the morning line man set an estimate, at 4-1. The public ended up not betting him as heavily as anticipated and he went off at 5-1.
The 9 ended up sitting right off the lead on a slow pace and took over at the top of the stretch and never looked behind. See the payouts from a $2 win bet below.
Not bad from a 5-second look at the pace projection! Check out the free races on TimeFormUS.com and see if you can replicate this!
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