Youbet.com's Show Me the Money!
Youbet.com has a "Show Me The Money" contest where participants try to hit ten consecutive show wagers at Turfway Park or Fairplex. Any Youbet account holder can play and entry is a live $10 show wager. Hit ten in a row and win $1,000. Sounds easy, eh?
Let's look at how a strategy of betting favorites to show would fare.
Based on a sample of 11,000+ races from the Fall of 2002, favorites win 36.3% of the time and finish in the money 70.4% of the time. Betting favorites to show is a losing strategy of course, but the rate of loss is only 7.5% - far better than the takout. Therefore if you play this contest by betting favorites you can expect to get back $9.25 for every $10 show bet.
Picking favorites in this contest is an example of a binomial experiment. The probability of success, a winning show bet, is 70.4% and the probability of failure is 1 - 70.4% or 29.6%. Each race represents an independent trial - independent because a favorite finishing in the money does not alter the probability that the next favorite will finish in the money.
The probability of x consecutive successes is 0.704x
Let's look at how a strategy of betting favorites to show would fare.
Based on a sample of 11,000+ races from the Fall of 2002, favorites win 36.3% of the time and finish in the money 70.4% of the time. Betting favorites to show is a losing strategy of course, but the rate of loss is only 7.5% - far better than the takout. Therefore if you play this contest by betting favorites you can expect to get back $9.25 for every $10 show bet.
Picking favorites in this contest is an example of a binomial experiment. The probability of success, a winning show bet, is 70.4% and the probability of failure is 1 - 70.4% or 29.6%. Each race represents an independent trial - independent because a favorite finishing in the money does not alter the probability that the next favorite will finish in the money.
The probability of x consecutive successes is 0.704x
The following table gives the probability of consecutive successes
|
1 |
70.4% |
|
2 |
49.6% |
|
3 |
34.9% |
|
4 |
24.6% |
|
5 |
17.3% |
|
6 |
12.2% |
|
7 |
8.6% |
|
8 |
6.0% |
|
9 |
4.2% |
|
10 |
3.0% |
Therefore, there is a 3.0% chance on any given card that you'll hit ten in a row playing favorites. That means there is a 3.0% of winning the contest. The anticipated loss from 10 $10 show wagers is $7.25. Would you pay $7.25 to get a 3% chance at a grand?
To find the number of favorites on a ten race card that hit the board is a little more complicated.
{10! / [x!(10-x!)]} 0.704x0.2961-x where x represents the number of successes
This is a just the binomial probability density function.
The following table gives the number of favorites in a ten race card finishing in the top three, and the corresponding probability
| 0 | 0.0% |
| 1 | 0.0% |
| 2 | 0.1% |
| 3 | 0.8% |
| 4 | 3.5% |
| 5 | 9.9% |
| 6 | 19.6% |
| 7 | 26.7% |
| 8 | 23.8% |
| 9 | 12.6% |
| 10 | 3.0% |
Yesterday's card at Turfway Park had eight favorites in the money (races 1,2,4,5,6,7,8,10).
Of course not all favorites have a show probability of 70.4%. We would expect a 1/2 favorite to be much more likely to hit the board than a 3/1 favorite (of course we'll get back much less from a winning show wager on the 1/2 horse than the 3/1 horse).
Based on my large sample of races from 2002 here are the show probabilities for some odds catagories
| Odds | Prob |
| 2/5 | 88% |
| 3/5 | 85% |
| 4/5 | 82% |
| Even | 80% |
| 6/5 | 77% |
| 7/5 | 75% |
| 8/5 | 72% |
| 9/5 | 69% |
| 2 | 66% |
| 5/2 | 60% |
| 3 | 55% |
To get more accurate probabilities, one must have the field size and estimated win probability for each race entrant.
As for yesterday at Turfway, There were only two odds-on favorites while there were three favorites with odds greater than 2/1. If you made contest wagers using this strategy, you'd be out in the 3rd race, but will have finished ahead by $1 ($30 wagered, $31 return from payouts of $2.60 and $3.60 from the 1st and 2nd race). If you bet all ten races you'd finish ahead $21.50 and will have had a five race streak, hitting races 4 through 8.
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