What makes horses win races

In fact, the time following the MIT blackjack team saw resurgence in the game. Horse racing can have that resurgence too, and it won't take a Triple Crown winner to do it.

People just need to think they are smarter than the game and believe they can win. The money can be made up to a degree in television ratings and advertising.

If people think they have an edge over the house, they will pay very close attention. As soon as the system starts getting beaten, the people in charge of the track will change it. The house is always designed to win.

Horse racing will be fine, especially after finding a new casual audience of supporters. They get their rake no matter what. All it takes is a formula that will produce winners with consistency.

A formula that can pick horses better than just looking at the morning line odds would make people feel like they have a huge advantage. Now I have my task. The base of my research was academic journals.

Curiously enough, there are more than a few scholars who have been enthralled enough by the sport and the math involved to have published there own works on the subject. Bolton and Randall G. Chapman, I found the information that would carry me through this project.

Bolton and Chapman set out to find which variables would be most important to consider when evaluating the horses in a race, and predicting the outcome. There research suggested that "average amount of money earned per race in the current year" and "average speed rating over the last four races" were the two most important factors. The shocker to me was that jockeys, post position, and weight were deemed inconsequential for the most part. The best jockeys were often put on the best horses, and their correlation nullified much of their value.

Armed with this new information, it was time to make an equation of my own. These are the questions Kenneth McKeever ponders when considering the science that separates the winners from the also-rans. He knows that horses have evolved several physiological features that make them ideal for running. For example, horses can breathe only through their nostrils, which are situated on the sides of their snouts. This is likely an adaptation for preventing kicked-up dust and dirt from entering their lungs when running with their mouth open.

It's a spleen that any elite athlete would envy. When the horse is just standing around, the percentage of oxygen-carrying red blood cells in its circulatory system runs around 35 to 40 percent. Blood in its huge spleen — 3 to 4 feet long, 8 inches wide, and 4 inches thick—is a whopping 80 percent red blood cells. When the horse starts its gallop, the surrounding muscles clamp down on the spleen like a bagpipe and squeeze all that extra blood into the circulation system.

Such is the nature of gambling against your peers in pari-mutuel wagering. It seems simple, but you need to put in the work in advance handicapping the card so you know going into the day which races you have the strongest opinion about.

This is the hardest part for me because, like most gamblers, I like the action of having a few bucks on the races I watch. If you love two or three horses, build a strategy around those two or three horses or simply bet most of your bankroll on those horses to win. There is value to finding horses that seem to be almost slam dunks to win, but that value might be skipping the race entirely or identifying longshots to fill in underneath for exactas, trifectas, or superfectas and around for multi-race wagers like the Pick 4.

Your top plays should offer value — in other words, a horse you think has a much better chance to win than his morning-line odds when planning, or live odds when betting, indicate. If you make three substantial win bets on horses at a solid value, you only need one winner to make a nice profit.

If two-thirds of that money is tied up in place and show bets, you might need all three to run well. Yes, my horse will wear a blanket, but only during inclement weather. No, I do not plan to blanket my horse. Featured Horse Listing. They have been rehabilitated, retrained and….

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