14/2/2003 edition

Trifectas
How to Bet for Value

Navaho Princess won the first at Randwick last Saturday. The filly started at $10.00 in the bookmakers' betting ring. On various totes she paid between $9.10 and $9.60.

If you have a horse around $10.00 winning a trifecta you expect a decent return. Otherwise, it probably makes more sense to back the horse outright for the win and forget about taking it in many of the trifecta combinations.

There were only seven runners in Navaho Princess's race. Unfortunately the second and third favourites finished second and third in that order. So the trifecta returned only $87.70 on the New South Wales tote.

Many punters would have taken Navaho Princess with field, field for second and third at an outlay of $30 in their trifecta combinations. Compared to win betting Navaho Princess, punters who did that got huge unders - less than $3.00 - outlay $30.00, return $87.70. (If these trifecta punters also had another horse such as the favourite to win, they would have fared even worse.)

Short priced favourites wreck trifecta payouts, particularly in small fields. The correct approach to betting Navaho Princess was to only take her to win in trifecta combinations with at the most one shortish priced horse to run second or third (preferably none.)

Leaving out the $2.00 tote favourite Charjeros from running second or third would have saved $10.00. In addition leaving out the short priced tote horses Superior Sateen and Ike's Dream from finishing second would have saved another $8.00.

The $18.00 saved could have been used to back Navaho Princess outright for the win. The trifecta would have been missed, because the short priced favourites ran two, three. But the win bet saver returned over $160. That total return is far better than getting the $87.70 trifecta payout on the New South Wales tote.

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