Tournaments / contests

 Tournaments are about being right for a very small sample size. I’m not a vet of tournies, but I’ve seen that advice many times. It probably makes sense. You hit 3 winners averaging 2-1 and some guy hits a 12-1 shot and bests you. If you can pick some live long shots and some medium ones and a couple of them hit, you can distance yourself.

A lot depends on your method. If you rank your selections first second, etc, and your top pick is a favorite, look at your second and third picks and take one with long odds hoping for the best. Or, if you like angles, play all the angles and hope that they work for these few races.

I’m usually looking for horses at 5/1 or better (and preferably in the higher range) but will take less odds later on in a contest depending on my score. But early on, I won’t take a 2/1 or 5/2, regardless of how good I think that horse is. Contests usually pay for both win and place, and sometimes a good priced place horse will pay you better than the winner.

If you are playing a contest with a mix of optional and mandatory races, I think you absolutely have to get good odds on your optional plays. Think of it this way, every time a big price comes in you pretty much have to assume that somebody has that price. I’ll be willing to take a somewhat smaller price on the mandatory races since everyone has to play that race, but I’m still going to try and get prices if I can.

The contests where I’ve performed the best were all ones where I was able to get a horse home at 15/1 or 20/1 shot at some point. It’s tough (at least for me) to grind out a win in a contest with lots of short prices.

I know that one of our readers, JP Fanshawe, plays a lot of contests. Perhaps he’ll chime in with his experience.

…and have been playing them for a while now. It is a fact of the mythical Win-place format that it will be very difficult to win if you don’t hit at least one “cap” horse, a 20-1 or more longshot whose payouts are capped, usually at 20-1 for win and 10-1 for place, which pays $64. So you must make sure that you put yourself in a position to hit one of those by playing some of them. I have seen many players doom their chances of actually winning an event by never even swinging for the fences. For this reason, I suggest that you always play the maximum number of entries allowed in a contest if you can afford it. Clearly, if you have the ability to play three horses in a single race, your chances of hitting a necessary-to-win longshot are much improved.

I agree with Matt about eschewing short-prices, but I would phrase it even more strongly: eschew them all together and never go shorter than 6-1, unless you are in the last stages of a contest and you are in the lead. And even then, I don’t know that I would do it.

Incidentally, Matt and I have had debates in this forum a couple of times about short-prices in contests that are all-mandatories — the NHC Tour Online contests, twinspires.com contests, etc,. Those debates have circled around this question: if a horse is just clearly much-the-best in a mandatory race, should you just take him and pocket the $6 or $10? I am still wavering a bit on that question, but I stil lean toward taking a cap horse and hoping for a place score….

Noel Michaels, whom I have met a couple of times at tournaments, wrote a good book on handicapping strategy and offered this bit of information: in win/place tourneys you should try to score 2.5 times the bankroll, meaning a 15-race contest with a $60 bankroll will typically have a winning total of around $150. Consider that breaks down to an average score of $10 per race, which I think furthers the argument against ever taking a short-priced horse. One 9-1 score buys you roughly three 2-1’s, meaning one right opinion in three races equals three correct opinions, and we all know how hard it is to pick just three winners in a row. This approach takes some getting-used-to, but I will tell you that on the whole it has made me a better handicapper because I am constantly looking for value in races, rather than merely the winner.

Lastly, contests are a grind and you will benefit from having the right mindset. You can’t check out of a contest mentally and get down on yourself when you whiff on, say, your first five selections. Most seasoned players I know hope to score on only four of 15 races. Think about that. Clearly, they are playing the kinds of horses that can get them to $150 with a strike rate of just 27 percent, which is to say, a mix of horses in the 8-1, 12-1, 20-1 range.

Hope this has helped, and I hope to see you at a contest sometime soon. I will be at Keeneland on July 30.