Place betting is one of the more common traditional forms of sports bets, providing additional security than win betting while offering competitive payout odds.
Place a bet involve selecting one runner to place 1st or 2nd in an event or race; an exacta bet requires selecting two runners who both finish 1st and 2nd, in their correct order, to win your wager.
Short-priced favorites
An unfortunate misconception among punters is the assumption that backing short-priced favourites each-way will produce a higher win strike rate. Unfortunately, however, many such horses end up losing at odds well below their true odds, rendering each-way betting unprofitable due to factors such as class, form and weight differences as well as being supported by blind favourite backers who do not understand how the market operates.
Focusing on races featuring competitive fields can help identify races in which your favorite horse may face strong opposition from multiple other horses, which can be identified using tools such as speed ratings and last-time out form. You should look out for discrepancies between your informed opinion and market odds – particularly effective in multi-race exotics such as quadrellas and doubles; or use short-priced favourites as anchor legs in horizontal exotics such as exactas and trifectas.
Parlay bets
Parlays are an effective way of increasing your payout when betting on sports. By combining multiple bets into one wager and multiplying their odds individually into a greater return than would otherwise be achieved with individual bets, parlays can create larger winnings overall than would otherwise be available through individual betting alone. Unfortunately, parlays tend to be riskier than individual ones and must win all legs to yield results; parlays may range in size between two and 10 bets before paying out their full value.
Many sportsbooks have rules prohibiting correlative same-game parlays, meaning that they prohibit parlays where both an over and team to win are made at once, even though their odds exceed those for just an over bet.
Parlay payouts can also be affected by pushes. Different sportsbooks handle pushes differently; therefore it is crucial that you find out the rules of your sportsbook before placing a parlay bet. If one team on your parlay wins, its payout will be reduced by one bet.
Exacta bets
An exacta bet is a type of horse race wager in which two horses you choose finish in first and second place in any order you specify. Although exactas can be difficult to win, they often provide greater returns than standard win/show bets; however, to achieve maximum profit from these bets it requires using solid handicapping fundamentals to determine the probability that two medium-priced runners finish first and second – thus increasing your chances of making money off them.
An Exacta Key Box bet is a more complex variant of exacta betting in which one horse (a “key runner”) is selected as the front runner and multiple runners are boxed to finish second – this makes the bet cheaper to place due to using less overall combinations. Your tote board at the track or online will show the likely payoffs from various exacta combinations; use this information to search for possible over/under bets while avoiding combinations that offer short odds.
