Creating a betting line
 

I have about 400 races under my belt now. I learned what i know from "money secrets at the racetrack." I like to muddle through things myself before seeing what others who have been successful do. I am happy with results so far but I am now curious if anyone here is also making their own lines. And if so, what is their general strategy for it.

Questions i have:
1. Do you create a 117% balance in lieu of the takeout? I have been using only 100%

2. Do you wager on any overlay or is there a limit. I only wager on horses i have at 6 to 1 or better or 14pts or better (what i consider a contender).

3. How do you separate the contenders? I think i have the most difficult time here. I actually capped myself at 40% because i think i could make too many errors with standouts. The favorites are often lower than that of course. I do have some horses that i have as contenders that i just don't assign enough value to but win at 3 to 6 to 1. This could be because i am not using the extra 17% in my line.

I am also interested in data keeping. I simply record every horses odds then record the winning horses odds to see the percentage of times they win. I read recently to keep off odds on all your horses, but it seems too time consuming for the purpose. Perhaps i am not seeing the value or the ease in doing this.

Hi Tizlinda,

A personal oddsline should add up as close to 100% as possible. One trick advocated by guys like Dick Mitchell, Steve Fierro, and I believe Mark Cramer, is the "80/20" method. In other words, 80% of the line total are your true contenders, while the remaining 20% is the remainder of the field, your non-contenders. Fierro also has ready-made oddsline templates from his book "The Four Quarters of Horse Investing".

The remaining questions are very open-ended. Others may answer better than I can, but contender separation/wager selection is wholely individual. What works for some might not do so well for others.

Odds Templates
 

While I haven't made an odds line in years, I commend your hard work. At some point, you should develop a sense of fair odds without the heavy lifting. Until then, here are templates that should help with the task. I think they came from a Jim Quinn book and he was summarizing Steve Fierro's work. They're a big time saver.

"The Best of Thoroughbred Handicapping" is the book that you're referring to. Excellent reading material!

FWIW, the Rx3 Oddsline on the Rx screen is intended to be a 80% probability line for the Top 4 ranked horses, with the remaining 20% for the rest of the field. We don't even translate probability to Odds beyond the Top 4 ranks.

Reviewing what's there briefly, I'm not sure that's displaying correctly as I originally intended it. But it's like that specifically because of Steve Fiero's concept in Four Quarters, a book which always influenced me and which I discussed extensively with Doc in his last year while he was commenting on RDSS.

It's a good book and I highly recommend it. Here's a link to it in our own Amazon Store: http://paceandcap.com/forums/showthread.php?t=7106

Ted