Am I Going To Profit From My Exacta Bet

An exacta bet is where you have to select the 1^st and 2^nd results in a race correctly. Although very difficult to get right the payoff can be large and it is a popular bet.

Quite often though exacta bets are placed without understanding the cost of placing the bet and the placing of various combinations means that you are not getting good value even if the bet wins. Today I am going to make sure that this never happens to you.

It is almost certain that you are going to wheel your bet. By this I mean you are going to be placing more than one exacta combination. The amount of combinations that you bet depends on whether or not you are looking to cash your bet or to hit a big score.

When betting exactas you need to remember that:

• There are maximum payouts, check the bookmaker you are placing the bet at.
• Your bankroll needs to be higher.

On the good side though these bets are:

• Often placed by people as fun bets.
• Used with a key horse and every other runner in the field.
• Without knowing what the final odds might be.
• Just checking odds on a few of the combinations.

All of this means that if, like every other bet, we are looking for value then we are going to be able to make a profit.

To be able to accurately make an assessment on the value of an exacta you need to estimate what you think the horses chances of winning are. We then need to ask ourselves, what is the chance that our first choice will win and if this happens what is the chance that our second choice will come second?

So how do we calculate the odds we need for our exacta?

Luckily this is not as complicated as you may think. Let us say that we have given horse A, 30% chance of winning and Horse B 20% chance of winning the race. By giving 30% to horse A we have given 70% to the rest of the runners of which horse B is taking 20%.

0.30 x (0.20 / 0.70) = 0.09 = 9%

The above calculation shows how likely it is that our combination is going to win, a chance of 9%. You can just replace the figures with whatever chances you have given your runners.

We now need to work out what the minimum odds are for the bet, and this is done the same as usual:

1 / 0.09 = 11.11

You classify this bet at odds of 11.11, if you then want 50% value you would need odds of 16.17.

Luckily you don’t need to worry about any of this as I have provided a calculator to do the calculations for you. You will need Excel to run the calculator which is now available in the downloads section.

To use this calculator you will need Excel. When you open the file you will get the following screen:

To use this calculator you just need to follow these few steps:

1)      Enter your estimate for each horse’s chance of winning the race. Always do this on the top row.

2)      This shows the total percentage of all the runners’ chances. This should equal 100% when you have finished your estimates.

3)      These are the minimum odds that you need to get on your exacta to place the bet. When you have entered all the estimated chances you will notice that they have automatically copied to the left column as well. This calculator works by calculating the horses on the top row as finishing first and those in the left column as finishing second.

4)      You can change the amount of overlay that you demand on your odds. If you require just 10% then put that in here and all the odds will change to reflect your requirements.

5)      In this box you change the number of exactas that you plan on betting. The more exactas you bet the higher the odds that you will require to get your value and changing this figure will adjust the odds to make sure you are still getting the same value.

It is as simple as that. From now on there is never any reason not to be able to always make sure you are getting value in your exacta bets.