There is no doubt that how you bet is just as important as what you bet on horse racing if you want to make a profit. Good money management is the key to being able to stay ahead and that’s an uphill battle when you’re trying to make a living betting on horses. One of the most important lessons you will learn about gambling, and perhaps life itself, is that you must keep track of your money and manage it wisely.

As I’ve often said before, “good money management will get you through times of bad downside better than good money management will get you through times of poor money management.”

One of the ways that the wise will tell you that you can make a profit on your bets is with tricks like distributing your money in the pools or increasing the amount of your bets based on your losses. Both of these tricks are very dangerous and not based on sound principles. A losing bet is a losing bet no matter how you bet it. If your flat bets don’t make a profit, increasing or decreasing the amount from race to race won’t help.

Let’s say you just bet on three races and lost all three. Does that mean you are more likely to win in the fourth? No. Why would losing three times make you a better handicap? Please don’t get caught up in the “Law of Probability” myth. There is no law that applies to how many times you can lose except the law of diminishing returns, which means how quickly your funds disappear.

Martingale betting has been around much longer than I have and the scientific community classifies me as a fossil. People have lost fortunes at the roulette wheel, baccarat tables, and race tracks using this progressive betting scheme. You may get lucky and win something when your bet amount increases, making you think the plan worked, but in the end, you will eventually lose.

Another betting method that has been doing the rounds lately is the idea of ​​spreading your amounts between the various straight betting pools. Bet a small amount to win, more to place and a lot to show. Where is the logic in this? If a winning bet is profitable, why do you need to bet so much to show? The same goes for the place bet.

While backing up your winning bets may make sense to preserve your funds because your horse is more likely to place or show than win, those bets still need to be able to show a fixed stake win for that scheme to work. If you get a flat 10% profit on your winners, but only hit 30% of the time, and you get 5% on show bets, but hit 60% of the time, you can put some money into the fund entertainment to maintain your cash flow. , but there has to be an overall win or you’ll keep losing.

The way to make a profit in horse racing is through a good handicap and being able to price a bet and then bet only when the odds are favourable. It is like any other investment. Don’t be fooled by these tricks and you might just make a profit one day. It’s not easy, but desperate measures that don’t make sense will only make it harder.