Horse racing handicappers
A horse racing handicapper studies a race and picks the horses he thinks will run best, and the good ones also say which of those horses are worth their price. Some work for the track and give their picks away, some sell them. Judge every one of them the same way: every selection, made before the race, graded at a flat $2 win bet.
What the job is
Handicapping a race means reading the past performances (how each horse has run, how fast, over what ground, against what company, from which post, with which rider) and turning that into an opinion about who wins. Racing also has an older use of the word: in a handicap race each horse carries a weight set to even up the field, and the official who sets it is called the handicapper. Any serious horseplayer is a handicapper in that sense. A handicapper by trade is one who publishes his opinion.
The part most people skip is the price. Picking the likeliest winner is the easy half; the crowd does that on its own, and the favorite is simply the horse the crowd likes best. The hard half is finding the horse that wins more often than its odds say. A handicapper who only picks winners is telling you what the board already shows.
The handicappers at the track
Many tracks employ a handicapper of their own. The one with the most influence sets the morning line, the odds printed in the program before any betting. That is a forecast of how the public will bet, not of who wins, so the right way to judge a morning line is by how close it comes to the final odds. It is not a pick, and I'd never treat a horse's morning line as a reason to bet it.
The same person, or another on the track's staff, often gives selections for every race in the program, on the track's broadcast or in the paper's racing pages. Those public handicappers are the ones people look up by track before a big meeting, and their picks cost nothing.
They also work with a handicap of their own. A public handicapper has to name a top pick in every race on the card, including the races where he has no real opinion. A bettor can pass those races. He can't. So I'd read a track handicapper for his reasoning and his comments on the horses, and I'd pay most attention to the races where he says he feels strongly.
The paid ones
Then there are the people who sell picks: tip sheets at the track gate, phone lines in the old days, and websites and subscriptions now, with the big races drawing the most of them. Before the Kentucky Derby you will find no shortage of people who have it figured out. I don't name services on this page, and the reviews in our handicappers section are where individual ones are judged.
Two sums apply to any of them. The first is the cost. Say you bet $20 a race on eight races, $160 for the day, and the picks cost $25. The fee is 15.6 percent of what you bet, paid before a horse leaves the gate, on top of the track's takeout. A handicapper has to beat both for you to come out ahead.
The second is the pool. Racing is pari-mutuel, so when a well-followed handicapper's followers all bet his horse, they lower its price together. Take a win pool of $60,000 with a 16 percent takeout and $10,000 on one horse: that horse is about 4-1. Add $3,000 from followers and it drops to about 3-1. The pick is the same. The payout isn't. How horse racing odds work shows that sum in full.
Reading a record
A racing record is not a sports record. There is no -110 to beat, so a win percentage on its own tells you almost nothing. A handicapper who picks favorites can hit a third of his races and still lose money.
The measure that works is the return on a flat $2 win bet on every top pick. Say a handicapper makes 100 selections, which costs $200 at $2 each. If 30 of them win and pay $6.00 on average, the return is $180, a loss of 10 percent. If only 18 win but they pay $13.00 on average, the return is $234, a profit of 17 percent. The second handicapper "wins" far less often, and he is the one worth reading.
So these are the questions I'd ask of any of them, free or paid:
- Is every selection there, losers included, and was each one published before the race?
- Is the record graded at a flat $2 win bet on the top pick, at the actual payouts?
- How many selections does it cover? A few hundred is a start; one hot meeting is nothing.
- When a handicapper shouts about a big exotic he hit, what did all his exotic tickets cost over the same stretch?
The last one catches the most people. A $3,000 superfecta looks like genius until you add up the tickets that missed. The same standard sits behind our ATB Verified mark, and what cappers are applies the same tests to the people who pick games.
If you follow one, use him for the thinking, not the ticket, and keep your stake where your bankroll says, whatever he calls his best bet of the day. The rest is on horse racing betting strategies. The crowd is a handicapper too, and a pretty good one. Anybody you pay has to beat it.