My experience in betting for more than thirty years has been that a first-class handicapper can expect to make as profit over a year about 20% of the total amount of money he has wagered, pro­vided that his betting has been flat, and provided that his play has been straight, not to place or to show.

I have found that this 20% profit can be radically in­creased by not betting at all on the winter tracks and by refraining from play until the major northern circuits, from Kentucky and Maryland up, have been operating for a month or so, and by ceasing to play even the major cir cuits about the first of October. In the spring a great many of the horses are rounding into condition through racing; one cannot be sure of their present form or their basic class until they have been competing for a while. Also the fall is a period of upsets; a great many horses have become stale from a long summer's competition, although a player may not be able to detect the fact from their most recent starts.

These statements as to profits that may reasonably be . expected are based solely on my own experience. I know nothing about what anyone else has been able to do. The statements are based upon accurate records- of all bets made over a long period of years. I have not retained the acre or so of detailed figures that made up the whole-record, but I have retained a correct summary for each year. The experience reflected definitely shows that 20% on total bet is the best that I can hope for; I can say nothing about the experience of other players because I have no records to go by.

If a player turns over his initial capital rapidly by bet­ting in an open fashion, wagering on several horses a day rather than on just one, he will increase his profits in total dollars won if he succeeds in maintaining his normal per­centage profit of twenty on the total amount wagered over a period. On the other hand, the more open the play the greater the number of chancy horses that must be ac­cepted as bets; there is some danger that a player who operates too openly will cease to attain his normal per­centage of winners and therefore injure rather than bene­fit himself. Whether to play openly or very tightly is a question that each individual must work out for himself on the basis of his own experience. My own best results seem to come from limiting action to a bet or two a day, which is on the conservative side. But a player never should let conservatism limit his bets to short-priced ap­parent cinch horses. He never will make a penny on them over a period of time.

The 20% profit figure, as I have said, is strictly a figure that can be realized from straight play only. It cannot be reached if much of the play is to place, and, in my ex­perience, no profit at all can be realized from betting to show.

I will now set out three lines of type, and then proceed to discuss them. The first figure in each line is a percentage of winning bets. The second figure is the average price which must be realized on the winning bets if a net profit of 20% of total amount bet is to be secured. The third figure is the 20% itself.

40% at 2/1 = 20%

60% at 1/1 = 20% 80% at 1/2 = 20%

The first line is intended to represent what has achieved through straight betting in the past and what a* player reasonably may hope to achieve in the future. The second line represents what must be achieved by a mixture of straight and place betting if the indicated 20% profit is to be secured. I say a mixture of straight and place betting because no one can get a percentage of winning transactions as high as sixty if the wagering is straight only, because the average price of even money, 1/1, is utterly unattainable in place betting on solid horses only. The third line represents what must be achieved in show betting if the 20% profit is to be secured.

Now let me take up these lines in order.

The first line, representing straight betting only, can be realized by a competent player of horses who is both a good picker of winners and an equally good bettor. A first-class handicapper who will make his choices with some caution, avoiding races too close to play and those too inferior to play, can secure 40% winners and do so month after month throughout the part of the year when he is active. That fact alone, of course, is of no significance on the issue of profit. But he can also get his winners at prices that will average the 2/1, or $6 mutuel, which is necessary if the whole string is to yield him the required 20% of total amount bet. Over the course of a year, a player who picks his own, without regard to the opinions of everyone else, will find that a number of his choices have won and paid extra-long mutuels solely because they were not liked by the selectors. It is the price of the good,or long order, secured by going against the opinion of the majority, that will have raised the average price of all winners to the 2/1 level necessary to make the forty winning bets out of each hundred yield the required profit.

It is as simple as that. An inferior handicapper can­not do it because he can't get 40% winners. And a handi­capper who never plays against the money can't do it be­cause the short-priced animals he backs will never permit his average price on winners to get as high as 2/1. But a good picker who is also a smart player can do it. He will get a higher percentage of winners than any public se­lector, because he can confine himself to spots and need not cover whole cards of bad as well as good races and those too close for play. And such a bettor will not be frightened off those good or long-priced horses which will yield him all his profit over a period merely because the selectors do not like them.

The second line represents a mixture of straight and place betting. The first figure, indicating the 60% win­ning transactions that must be secured, is attainable by a good handicapper. He could not reach it on straight bet­ting only, but he can reach it by injecting into his play a sufficient number of bets to place. But the second figure, the even-money average price on winning transactions, in my experience is unattainable if 60% winning bets are also secured. To get 60% winning transactions a consider­able proportion of all bets must be made to place, and prices realized on the place bets will pull down the re­quired figure of even money, 1/1, the average price se­cured on all winning transactions, both straight and place. A player can pull and haul at this equation representing mixed straight and place betting in an effort to wrench it into a substantial profit, but almost inevitably he will fail. The more he bets straight, in an effort to raise aver­age price on winners, the more certainly he will be un­able to secure, 60% successful transactions. And the more he bets place, in an effort to raise his percentage of suc­cessful transactions to sixty, the more certainly he will fail to secure an average price of even money on all the bets, both straight and place. Even money, or a $4 mutuel, is not a low but a high price to be returned .by a horse solid as placed in his race when bet to run second.

I am not saying that it is utterly impossible to make any profit by hazarding a mixture of straight and place bets.' But it is practically impossible for one not an extremelyt fine handicapper, and in any event such a player can use his money to greater advantage by always betting straight-It certainly is very difficult for an average individual to make any money through such betting; the probabilities are that he will make nothing on his straight bets as a group and just a little on his place bets.

Place betting alone is a type of operation that requires great skill. Not even a top handicapper can secure much better than 60% successful transactions through wagering to place only, and his average prices, without any assistance from occasional straight bets, have little chance to reach any such level as even money. In my experience some money can be made place betting by an exceptionally competent figurer of winners. But almost certainly even such a man would have made more money by backing the same horses straight in the same amounts. The cut on natural profits of a place wager effected by the mutuel mode of computing prices is too great.

The third line of the three I have been discussing gives an approximation of what must be accomplished in show betting if material profit is to result. And here it can be said, flatly and accurately, that no profits can be realized from show betting over a prolonged period of time. Even horses of the type represented by public selectors' best bets will not run in the money in eighty of one hundred cases. A show bet winning percentage between seventy and seventy-five is what develops over a year in the case of such animals. Also it is a mere delusion to expect an average price of 1/2,. $3 mutuel, on horses bet to show that stand.out so clearly in their races that they can be expected to run in the money 80% of the time. The savage slash in all show prices, caused by the mutuel take and the mutuel method of computing show prices, utterly prohibits realization of any profit from betting horses to run third. A player may dream about getting strings of long-shots in the money at fair show mutuels, but he is merely kidding himself and will awake to reality as soon as he does start any such wagering with real money.

If a player wants to find out what he can do with bet­ting let him buy racing sheets daily, start figuring his own winners, make bets on paper of the types involved in the three lines I have been discussing, and see how close he can come to the average prices indicated as yielding 20% profit from each of the three types of play. If he can make the first two lines work out in his own check, then he is good and probably can make some money if he goes to the track or bets away from the track. But he will find that he can never make his check on show betting fulfill the requirements of the third line. It just can't be done by any human.

The average player of horses is always chasing will-o'-the-wisps and fireflies of new systems that are going to enable him to do steadily what he never has come within miles of doing before: to make some money. But there are only three ways to back a horse, straight, place and show—if one leaves out the parlays and conditional bets invented by simpletons ages ago for their own destruction, to say nothing of the daily double invented by the tracks to further the same high purpose. It should not be an impossibly brilliant feat of the intellect for a player to try each of these three methods in a systematic way to see which is best, if, indeed, any at all proves worth any­thing. Such a tryout should prove to nine hundred and ninety-nine players out of one thousand that they are not equipped to do anything with horses, and either send them back to their own little private schools of handi­capping, or lead them to quit the game cold.

On the other hand, a player who can make the str betting profit-formula work out is in a position to make a good deal of money if he can add small initial profits his limited beginning capital without draining the fund by dipping into it for expenses. Profit of 20% of the" total amount bet in a year will reach a tremendous per­centage of original capital because the fund has been turned over rapidly and re-ibet time and again. Speed of turn-over depends on the degree of openness of play, which simply means the number of wagers the bettor makes in a single day. My own practice is to make one, two or three bets daily, rarely more, and even to pass all cards if I can find no horse whose chances I really like. This is all the openness I care to undertake. I think that five, six or seven bets a day are too many in the sense that it is difficult to find so many horses really well placed, and it is mere nonsense to go to the track daily and force a bet in each race of the seven or eight on the card.

To anyone who is interested I offer the opinion that a handicapper good enough to undertake real betting at all needs no more reserve set aside when he starts than twenty single bets of the amount he plans to risk on each horse! Thus a capital of $200 should be sufficient to support $10 straight betting, $1,000 for $50 betting, and $2,000 for $100 play. Remember this statement is limited to the case of a first-class handicapper, and has no application to novices or previously unsuccessful haunters of race tracks or poolrooms. As capital grows with profits the size of individual wagers can be increased proportionately, but betting should be held at the new level until additional profits justify another increase.

If two $10 bets are made each day on one hundred and fifty days of each year, and if an average profit of 20c is made each time a dollar is wagered, the return from the whole string in the year will be $600—a substantial profit on the original capital of $200. Profits of this order are attainable through straight betting on horses selected by an expert handicapper without regard to the opinions of either selectors or public, but are entirely out of reach of place betting or show betting.

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