The Most Expensive Word in Handicapping Is “Also”

By HCRALabs / @ThoroQuant

There's a word that has probably cost horseplayers more money than they realize: “Also.”

I like the 4.

But the 7 could win, also.

And the 2 has a legitimate shot.

Oh, and I can't let the 9 beat me at that price.

Sound familiar?

By the time we finish constructing a Pick 5 ticket, what began as a handful of strong opinions can turn into an expensive collection of horses we're afraid to leave out.

That's not necessarily bad handicapping. Some races genuinely require coverage. But it raises a question I think deserves much more attention:

Are we building a ticket around what we believe—or around what we're afraid might happen?

Those are two very different things.

The mathematics of “just one more”

Let's look at a simple example.

Suppose you're building a $0.50 Pick 5 ticket. You've handicapped all five races, identified your contenders, and settled on this structure:

That's 24 combinations.

Total cost: $12.

Now imagine taking another look at the ticket. You're a little uncomfortable singling the first race. You see another horse who could win the second. There's a longshot you don't want to leave out of the third. So you add just one more horse in every leg. Your new ticket looks like this:

That's 216 combinations.

Total cost: $108.

You haven't changed your original opinion about who the strongest contenders are. You've simply purchased more protection against being wrong. And your ticket now costs nine times as much.

Does it have a better chance of hitting? Of course. You've covered more outcomes.

But has the probability of winning improved enough to justify paying nine times the original price? That's a completely different question. And it's one many horseplayers never really answer.

Handicapping and wagering are not the same decision

I think this distinction is fundamental.

Handicapping asks:

Which horses are most likely to win this race?

Wagering asks:

Given what I believe, the available prices, and what it costs to express that opinion, is this a good bet?

You can be excellent at the first and still make costly mistakes with the second. A horse can be a perfectly legitimate contender without deserving a place on every ticket.

The problem isn't that the horse can't win. The problem is that including the horse has a cost—and that cost has consequences for the economics of the entire wager. This is especially important in horizontal wagers.

There's a difference between coverage and conviction

One of the things I've come to believe strongly is that a handicapping opinion should express more than a collection of possible winners. It should express where the evidence is strongest and where confidence begins to fall away.

Consider two horses. Horse A has a compelling case based on the race as it stands today. Horse B has enough going for it that you can't completely dismiss its chances. Both might belong somewhere in your handicapping analysis. But that doesn't mean they deserve equal treatment in your wagering decisions. If you're constructing a conventional horizontal ticket with equal stakes on every combination, adding Horse B gives every combination containing that horse the same base investment as the combinations containing Horse A. That's a meaningful commitment. And it should be a deliberate one.

Now, sometimes Horse B absolutely deserves inclusion. Perhaps the race is genuinely wide open. Perhaps your confidence in Horse A is weaker than it first appeared. Perhaps the additional coverage is reasonably priced. Fine. The point isn't that spreading is wrong. The point is that every horse should have a reason to be on the ticket beyond “I don't want to lose to him.”

The dangerous comfort of a winning ticket

Here's something else worth thinking about. A ticket can hit and still have been a poor investment. Imagine the $108 Pick 5 ticket from our earlier example catches all five winners. Great. You got the sequence right. But suppose the winning $0.50 combination pays $80. How many times has that happened? LOL.

You collected $80 on a ticket that cost $108 and you successfully handicapped five consecutive races and lost $28.

Making money on one ticket doesn't necessarily mean the wager offered attractive value when it was placed. We've all seen screenshots of impressive Pick 4 and Pick 5 payouts. What we don't always see is how much somebody invested to get there. A $200 payout sounds terrific. A $200 payout on a $20 ticket is a very different outcome from a $200 payout on a $150 ticket. Their economics are worlds apart. If we're serious about evaluating wagering performance, the investment matters just as much as the payout.

Sometimes the right answer is to spread

I don't want anyone reading this to conclude that the solution is to single aggressively in every race. That's not the point. Sometimes the evidence really does suggest that several horses have meaningful chances. Pretending otherwise doesn't make a ticket smarter. It just makes it cheaper. A thin ticket built on unjustified conviction can be every bit as poor a wager as an oversized ticket built on fear. There are races where broader coverage makes sense. There are races where a strong opinion deserves to carry much of the ticket. And there are sequences where the cost of covering the uncertainty simply isn't attractive. Recognizing the difference is part of handicapping, not an admission that the handicapping failed. You can have an informed opinion on every race without finding every possible wager worth making.

What this means for HCRALabs

One of the reasons I've spent so much time building HCRALabs is that I believe serious horseplayers need more than another list of selections. I want the analysis to communicate where the evidence is concentrated, where meaningful contenders separate from the rest, and where uncertainty remains.

That's why our Race Sheets emphasize a hierarchy of contenders and Upside Horses rather than treating every horse with a plausible chance as interchangeable. The objective isn't to tell somebody that a horse cannot win. This is horse racing. Anything can happen. The objective is to help the horseplayer understand which conclusions deserve the greatest weight when a wagering decision has to be made.

Longer term, I want HCRALabs to put much more of that underlying race intelligence directly into the hands of serious handicappers. Not more numbers for the sake of having more numbers. Information that can help distinguish a strong opinion from a marginal one—and a potentially worthwhile wager from an expensive collection of possibilities.

What do I do personally? I no longer put more than one leg with B-tier horses in it. Or if I really want to have B-tier horses spread, then I trim bottom B-tier horses to address the cost-benefit we’ve been discussing. More often now I simply construct all A tier, and for those who have been following me know we have had some powerful days where HCRALabs A tiers dominated. What I found is when I cash, I am cashing more profitable tickets and much fewer of those tickets where the favorites got home and I cashed a loser. Nothing is perfect. There are times when it doesn’t work out. But economically, I’m finding I don’t need to win as often to remain profitable.

You may have noticed in the results analysis we publish after every race card I explicitly call out that we don’t take credit for having provided the winning double or pk3/4/5/6 ticket if there is more than one B tier winner in the entire sequence. The presence of any C or X tier automatically disqualifies us from making such a claim. So, you’ll never see us say we gave you the B/B/A/B/B pk 5. If you ever see us claim credit with more than one B tier in our sequence, call me out on it.

Recently we had an all A Pick 5 for $24 that paid ~$1,350. It’s in our website highlights. That’s what we want to cash. I’m not even interested in $400 tickets that pay $1,350 because I’ve seen too many times where those $400 tickets go up in smoke.

One final thought

The next time you're building a Pick 4, Pick 5, or Pick 6 ticket, pay attention to the moments when you find yourself saying: "I should probably add this one, too." Sometimes that addition will be justified. Sometimes it will save the ticket. But sometimes you're not purchasing meaningful protection. You're simply paying more money to feel less uncomfortable about being wrong. And in a game where the cost of being wrong is already high, that distinction deserves some serious thought.

Every “also” has a price.

The question is whether the horse you're adding has earned it.

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