Simple Horse Race Bet Tips for Beginners

As online betting services are opening up horse racing for a new generation, there have been more and more young people looking at the sport in a serious way. For a long time, the ability to participate in the sport as a fan was limited to those lucky enough to live geographically close to an off-track betting parlor or a major race track. Online services allow you to place a horse race bet on practically any race in the country from home, but before you do, it is important that you learn a few key tips that will help make your first couple of horse race bets with sound judgment.

It Takes Money to Make Money

The bets that are most likely to pay out cost a little more, and that’s just the first way that this statement holds true in horse racing. Success at placing a winning horse racing bet is a matter of understanding what statistics are going to matter most under the conditions of that day, with those competitors your pick is facing. That requires a strategy that works on statistical likelihood, and any strategy like that will have to have a pre-determined acceptable rate of failure to be effective at all. It’s simply a matter of the math. You’ve got to be able to afford to be wrong a few times, especially while you’re learning.

Learn to Study Workouts

There are a lot of basic horse race bet tutorials that talk about handicapping and past performances, and those metrics are important. In fact, if you don’t know about them, learning their ins and outs should be your next step. Still, they aren’t everything. Studying them can tell you how a horse has done against certain competitors, on certain track types, and so on. Studying the horse’s workouts is the way to see how future performance is likely to compare to those past showings, though. If you want your decisions to be grounded in the best information possible, it is essential to make use of both sets of tools.

Check Out the Track Condition

The question of whether a horse is running on turf or on dirt can be important when you are trying to determine its likely performance on a given day. Equally important, though, are the track conditions. Both turf and dirt behave differently during inclement weather than they do during bright, sunny days. Learn how recent weather has affected the track. If you can’t get out there to look at it, find an online report on the condition before placing your horse racing bet. That way, you have more depth to your data, and you can bring that attention to conditions to your interpretation of handicapping and past performance data.

Wrap-Up

When you are getting ready to place your first online horse race bet, remember that success comes with careful study and research, and even then it is not guaranteed. The more you learn, the better you will do, but even then, knowing how to play a strategy that hedges properly is key to your success.