[indio]

Never ever bet horses offshore

It is the biggest sucker bet you can ever make

Play with legal usa shops hooked into totes

Quite the opposite. If you're betting win pools, you'd be a sucker if you didn't play offshore. Of course, it needs to be a good shop, but if you want to be a long term winner betting races, offshore is your only hope. Let's look at 2 examples.

1rst example is at a big track like Hollywood Park with 100,000 in the pool. Lets say the #3 horse is the horse you like and there's 27,000 bet on him in that pool. You want to bet $500 to win on him. So now there's $100,500 in the pool and $27,500 bet on the #3 horse. Hollywood is going to take 15.43% out of that off the top, so that leaves $84,993 to pay out to the $27,500 which bet the #3. That would be +209, so the pari-mutual price should be 6.18 BUT, tracks have a little something called breakage (theft) where they ALWAYS round down to the nearest .20, so this horse would pay 6.00. That means the track took 17.93% of the money. If you bet that horse at 5 dimes, your $500 bet isnt going into the pools, so the horse would end up paying 6.20. AND, you're getting 10% added to that (if your signed up for that), so your mutual is 6.86. So for your $500 bet, if you win you'll get back $1715 at 5 dimes compared to $1500 through the track tote. Thats a HUGE difference.(7.4% juice vs. 17.93% juice) Now, I doubt they will let you beat them forever if you're good at picking winners,and do it regularly, but lets just say you bet 100 races like this over the course of a year at $500 a pop. If you have moderate success picking 32 winners, and the average payout scenario is just like above, then you would lose 2k betting through the mutuals, and win 5k betting at 5dimes.

Now lets say you want to bet $500 on a horse at a medium to smaller track (C track) at Beulah. Lets say you like the #2 horse and the pool has 25,000 total with 7,000 bet on the #2. Beulah takes 18%, so if you did nothing, this horse would pay 5.80 at the track, but if you bet the $500 there, youre now 25,500/7,500, which means the horse will pay 5.40 through the mutual. At 5 Dimes, you're getting 6.38. So if the #2 wins, you get back $1350 betting through the track, and $1595 back at 5dimes.

No one with an ounce of sense will try to beat a 18% rake AND bet against his own money. That's one of the reasons horse racing is a dead sport now, because governments wanted some of the money and forced higher takeouts. There was a time in the golden age of racing where the pari-mutuals only took 5%. In fact, in Kentucky law from 1931, a Paris-mutual(not mispelled, this was invented in Paris, France)is considered a player vs player pool where the host takes a 5% commision.

Now, if your betting pick 6's and big carryovers, OF COURSE you want to bet those through track pools, because now your'e talking huge payoffs (and you might be the only winner, so there wont be a payoff offshore). But most forms of betting on horses is suicide through mutual pools. And many of these tracks keep raising their take-outs. California has one of the highest exacta take outs in the country at 22.68%

And as far as worrying about books making excuses about getting the bet in on time, just make sure you're playing where it's time stamped, and don't wait for the very last minute. All races have an official start time that says when the gate opened. If you're a few minutes ahead of that, you should't have any worries with a good book.