HDon't shop till you drop
The road to happy horse-playing navigates about as easily as the 405 in Los Angeles or the 401 in Toronto. If you can manage to pick up any pace at all, you still need to zig when others zag, and don't even mention the potential potholes.
The game is tough enough when you travel a well-beaten path. But the single-most egregious error horseplayers most often make is leaving their comfort zone.
While it's difficult enough to rub the crystal ball and foretell the future at the pari-mutuel windows, many handicappers veer off their beaten path and lose the most important asset in their arsenal: familiarity. Blame it on personal responsibility and technology.
The national simulcasting boom in the early to mid-1990s opened a world of horse-playing opportunities to fans across the country. With it came variety, both of the appealing and dangerous flavors. Shop wisely and unearth races of appeal that your local venue simply can't provide. Shop frivolously and find yourself screaming at jockey "M. Berry" from thousands of miles away because you don't know the circuit well enough to even know his first name.
I interact with a lot of horseplayers, and have even spent some time managing the mutuels operation of a mid-sized off-track wagering facility. When you pace behind the teller line for eight to twelve hours a shift, you see and hear everything.
One day I recall a guy who was a decent-sized bettor, but not a real sharpie, bet $50 to win on the No. 1 horse in every race for the day before Fair Grounds' card even opened. While walking the floor later in the day, I asked him how it was going and why the No. 1 horse. He replied, "My buddy told me there was a rail bias there yesterday. I usually play Philly." The cynic in me went back at day's end and checked the Fair Grounds results only to find that not a single No. 1 horse scored on the program. You didn't know if you wanted to feel bad for the customer, or smack him silly.
Ask many horseplayers what their favorite circuit is to play, and you'll likely get a multiple answer of three or more tracks. At-home players are especially spread out in their action, as I'm told by an online wagering insider that the average customer bets more than five different racing venues per day.
Can you imagine having a true feel for that many different racetracks? Unless you're taking your cues from computer-generated data or number-crunched odds-play only, it's folly to spread yourself so thin as to lose any competitive edge.
Familiarity breeds confidence in the horseplayer. During my pinnacle for charting races for Equibase Company, I am 100-percent certain that I was the "most-dialed" of my daily handicapping career.
Watching races live, writing comments on each horse, reviewing the replays upwards of four and five times to complete the chart -- all these things worked in concert to make handicapping seem like taking a swing at a beach ball.
By absorbing one circuit like a sponge, a horseplayer can glance at the past performance lines and tell by the top three finishers listed if a $15,000 claiming race was tough or weak. The names don't just mean something; they mean almost everything when you possess familiarity.
Nowadays, my career takes me all over the racing map, so I'm not as keyed-in on everyday racing circuits as I once was. Much of my work now centers on the major stakes around the country, and I find myself honing in on the top-shelf runners at the premier and mid-level venues.
In focusing on just the stakes runners, I can devour the past performances for familiar races and horse names in the running lines, easily able to rattle off the top sprinters at Turf Paradise or the grass sprinters at Monmouth. I can remember that Johnny Velazquez jumped off this horse last time because he was out of town riding for Todd Pletcher. Many of the handicapping mysteries not assigned a number or figure become increasingly clear.
The hardcore, everyday player likely will be set in his or her ways. If that means handicapping four tracks per day and watching the toteboard for action, it's likely to go unchanged. But fans that love the game, and hold down real jobs, don't have the luxury of watching Wednesday, Thursday and Friday races. When they come to the track on Saturday gripping two, three, or four hundred bucks to spend, they're not playing at the $2 level. But they're also not entrenched in every move made at a myriad of national racetracks.
It's vital that these players, the often-overlooked segment of the horse-playing colony, make wise decisions and get the most out of their 40-50 annual weekend trips. The more successful the Saturday bettor becomes, the more likely he or she will return on Sunday before having to go back and punch the time clock on Monday.
So the next time someone asks you how to be a better bettor, remind them to stay true to what's most familiar to them. It's the one tip at the track you don't want to forget.
Jeremy Plonk has been an ESPN.com contributing columnist since 2000. You can E-mail Jeremy about any racing-related topic at plonk@horseplayerdaily.com.
