[Bishop22]

Yes it is very, very difficult for an individual, especially one with a limited amount of leisure time, to beat the races. If you go to work all week and then go to the track or OTB on Saturday and pick up a DRF to handicap you going to find it near impossible especially if you are betting into the pari-mutuel pool.

The average takeout across major tracks is probably 17.5% for the win pool. Tom Ainslie in his book: 'The Complete Guide to TB Racing' talks about "getting this number down", which I think is a great way to look at it. The first thing you can do these days is to bet with an off-shore book. Pinny reduces the takeout at most tracks by 7% to 10%, and at NYRA tracks by 4% to 11% (by the way you should be betting NYRA tracks through 5dimes for the 10% payout bonus). We are only talking about win bets here, there is absolutely no reason to bet exotics until you have proven you can pick +ROI winners, for one thing the takeout is higher, and for another picking minor finishers is less skill and more luck.

Ok that was the easy part of "getting the number down", next you need knowledge, knowledge of what you are looking at in the PPs or Thorograhps or whatever tool you are going to use. The book I mentioned above along with Davidson's Picking Winners and Quinn's Condition Book are the required reading, yes they are a little old but I haven't seen any modern books that compare.

I'm off to get my wisdom teeth ripped out, I may write some more later or I might just enjoy my Vicadin enduced haze.