USING BRISNET'S PRIME SYSTEM....

Blind bet:
127 winners
out of 1128 runners
$809 return
or 72% return on the money.

So that's what you get just betting at random.

It "should be" about 82% given the takeout.

And the implication is that the longshots are doing very poorly. If horses did win in accordance with their odds, you'd have 82%. If the longshots win more than their share, you'd be getting a return above that.

Now the question is, does Brisnet's prime system help?

It's a remarkably consistent system. In this database, they get exactly what they claim to get: 31% winners from their top prime. The return goes up to 89%. That's a gigantic improvement, but a long way from a winning game.

Overall, requiring your horse to be in the top five of Brisnet's prime boots your return to 83%...

...but there are other easy ways to get that same return, if not a better one.


In this sample, simply confining your bets to horses under 10-1 improves your return to 87%. You get about the same number of horses as you would by using the top five primes in the Brisnet system. But you get a better return.

In other words, the tote board is more predictive than Brisnet's prime.

You can duplicate and even improve on Brisnet's result simply by betting no horse over 3-1. In our sample there were 223 such. They won at a rate of 30%. They returned 89 percent of the bettor's money.

Although nobody's going to get rich on that insight, it does offer a chilling realization. If the 3-1 and under horses are returning money at 89%, then since this is a zero-sum game, the higher-odds horses must be doing poorly indeed.

Yup! The 904 horses in our sample that went off at greater than 3-1 odds returned only 68 cents on the dollar.

So here's another way to look at it....

Handicapping horses at 3-1 or less: 11% effective track takeout.
Handicapping higher-odds horses: 32% effective track takeout.

So it is three times harder to handicap a profit using higher-odds horses.

Surely some handicappers will object to this, saying they don't want to be restricted to chalk play. Fine. You can set your odds limit at 10, and still be working at about a 14% effective takeout. And there's nothing to say you can't break your own rules under special circumstances. Maybe there's a 12-1 shot you think is really worth the plunge...








*data: 127 races, 1128 runners