I've done this several times with unwavering results. Gamblers who don't bet much on the horses but instead play football, cards, dice or whatever will come out with non-committal responses like: "not too bad", "sounds OK" and "reasonable". Horse-players are uniform in their response: "Tough one."
Indeed. Winning showdown contests, as they are often called, sounds easy but is hard to pull off. In the best-known format, "survivor showdown", each player in the tournament places a show bet on a horse. Those who collect continue to place show bets in consecutive races while the losers drop out until eventually only one player remains and collects the pool. In a variation on this, each player is simply awarded a point for every show bet cash and the player with the most points at the end of the contest wins. This way you can lose one or two and still be in the hunt.
So how hard is it to pick consecutive show payers? Let's do the math on the TwinSpires Australian 5-for-5 on Friday nights, one of my favorite betting contests. Here you've got to do what's described in the first paragraph: pick five horses in a row to show without a loss. If you hit it, you - or anyone else who also hits it - wins all or a share of $1,000. That bet sounds attractive to gamblers who think they can "beat the races" as opposed to "beat a race". Is it?
Let's do the simple math. The chances of picking a horse at random to show in the average 12-horse race is 1 in 4 (3 placings out of 12). Multiply that by a factor of five (the number of races) and you get 1,024-1. Those are the odds of the proverbial monkey throwing five darts at five 12-horse (about) race-cards at Moonee Valley on Friday night and landing on a horse that hits the board each time without missing. The chance plays, if you will.
We would of course like to think that if we handicap show horses against the dart-tossing chimp, we would whip his butt. But how likely is that really?
Remember that the monkey throwing darts at the race card is hitting the 5-for-5 at 1,024-1 odds. So what are the odds on offer in the TwinSpires 5-for-5, assuming you are the only person competing who manages to go five for five (and the past two weeks the $1,000 has been shared)? The jackpot is paying you $1,000 plus the show dividends for the five horses (let's say another $100) to a $25 outlay to pull it off. So the odds are 44-1.
By those odds, you - the smart punter - are 23 times more likely to handicap your way past the monkey. Put another way, if you and the monkey handicapped 23 consecutive cards over 23 Friday nights, your way and his, the monkey would win just one. Is your judgement really that much better than the monkey's dumb luck? You'd like to think so, but I've got a sneaking suspicion that the primates may have the hominids slightly over-matched on this one.
That said, you'll want to play in this contest if you can stay up that late on a Friday and still be able to work a computer mouse. All showdown tournaments are a blast but the Australian 5-for-5 has the added advantage of showcasing some of the best and most competitive turf racing in the world at this time of the year. And if you miss the main prize you can still win your way into the $1,000 consolation-prize pool just for cashing five $5 show tickets. That will often add an extra $30-40 to the bankroll.
So let's get a bit more distance between us and those fortunate apes. Try these tips to pull the show odds in your favor:
1) Consistency is everything. Horses are creatures of habit - they run with the pack and follow the leader. A horse that learns early on that it is a front-finisher (and yes, horses do have a mind for these things) will tend to keep on doing that, while the horses around him/her can pick it up and adjust accordingly. Horses that have consistently hit the board over 10 or 15 starts are more likely to do it again simply because they have developed the habit of doing so. Watch them.
2) Drop a bomb. Many players mistakenly think that showdowns are all about chalk play. Not so. Anything that hits the board at more than 5-1 is likely knocking at least one that's shorter (even a lot shorter) off the board, and all its players along with it. And the longer the prices of the other two horses that hit the board, the more likely you are to separate yourself from the field with such a pick. So if you don't want to share the prize with ten other people (as happened in the Caulfield Cup Day 5-for-5), throw in at least one strong horse at a value price. Even two.
3) Handicap the bias. If possible, sit out the first couple of races to check for any noticeable daily track bias towards speed horses or closers. Daily track bias will kill the best-handicapped contest card very early on if not accounted for, especially on the American dirt - less so on the Australian turf, where tracks are regularly watered and rails shifted. But speed horses on a day of speed bias, for example, are a showdown-player's dream because they hit the board so predictably - even on the Aussie turf.
4) Listen to the locals. Australian tracks are more of a challenge to handicap because the grass surfaces, larger fields and the tighter Australian style of racing combine to make results more unpredictable. Shippers are almost always under-bet and the greater the distance between one track and another (and that can be a long way in Australia) the better the value, for the most part. A local horse-player who handicaps all the city tracks every weekend of the year (like RePete) gets an edge when all the good horses end up at the same tracks at the same time, like the Melbourne Spring Carnival.
5) Play along. The rule in the TwinSpires Australian 5-for-5 is that only your first $5 show wager in a race counts as your contest wager. So the contest becomes more fun if you then start using your show bets to key around boxed exactas and trifectas - and TwinSpires naturally supplies all the standard and exotic bets on the showdown races on their platform as you go. The Australian attitude here is: if you've handicapped the races anyway, you might as well have a punt on the side. Go with that.
