Will-pays, contest plays can make for useful hedge tool

There are many ways in which contest play and cash play intersect. When I wrote “The Winning Contest Player” a few years back, Eric Moomey pointed out to me that some of his big contest wins didn’t come from contests themselves, but rather from hedge bets he made in the last leg of contests. If he likes two horses, he’ll play one in the contest and the other at the windows to win a similar prize (in dollar terms) to what the contest offers.

Many live tournament players use exotic will-pay screens to help them out. The will-pays can help you determine what price a certain horse will be in the end. Say it’s the last race of a contest and you need a 4-1 shot to get to your goal. A horse you like is 6-1, but in the will-pays you can see he’s paying nearly the same as the current 8-5 favorite. You can bet that horse will be too short to use. If that horse is the fifth choice in the picks, you should be A-okay to use.

Will-pays, and by extension, probable-pays, can also put a horseplayer onto a sneaky horse that is live. If you can tell a runner in the second leg of the double is taking money relative to its morning line, you might want to take a second look at that horse, especially if this is a leg where you were planning to spread (in cash play) or where your main opinion was mainly against a favorite (in contest play).

Recently, a player named Kyle Bailey wrote to me with a connection between contest and cash play that I’d never really considered: using other players’ contest picks as a guide to help construct horizontal wagers.

Let me explain: On the DRF Tournaments website, most contests use a format called all-in. In an all-in game, all the players’ picks must be in before the scheduled post time of the first race. This also means that once the first race has started, an industrious player can click through and see what other players are playing.

As you probably already know if you are reading this column, all contest players are not created equal. In a move seemingly taken straight from the poker world, Bailey looks at these picks and tracks players to record average win totals and betting styles. Obviously, this can come in very handy for tournaments. If you have a good idea of what your opponent might do, you have a huge advantage. But he’s also used this data to help with cash play.

“I’ve started to look for consensus patterns in the 5-1 to 10-1 type tourney picks being played by consistent top leaderboard guys,” Bailey explained. “Every once in a while, a horse I would have tossed when putting together my late rollers is taking money in all-in tourneys, tipping off a live animal hours before seeing a will-pay screen.”

This came in very handy on a recent Sunday, when Bailey noticed many of the players he follows picking eventual 11-1 shot Untrapped to win the Oklahoma Derby.

“Had I not noticed that and decided to include him on my pick four tickets, I would have missed a nice little score,” he said.

Another application of Bailey’s data is to help him find potential short-priced singles in pick sequences.

“When I see multiple players who rarely bet chalk in tourneys have 2-5 faves as selections, I figure there’s no sense trying to beat the faves the smart tourney money thinks can’t lose,” he continued. “So I single away and move on.”

Three chances at Santa Anita

Santa Anita will be holding three handicapping contests this weekend with prizes including cash and seats to major tournaments. Friday’s event is a $500 live-bankroll feeder into the Saturday and Sunday contests. Saturday’s buy-in is $3,000; Sunday costs $2,000.

Santa Anita also is offering bonuses to players who do well throughout the weekend. There’s a $50,000 bonus to a player who wins two of the three, a $250,000 bonus to a player who sweeps the three, and a $1 million bonus should the Saturday or Sunday winner go on to win the Breeders’ Cup Betting Challenge. Interested players should contact Nate Newby at (626) 407-5161.

Several of the players at Santa Anita will have qualified to play through DRF Tournaments. For more tournament news and qualifying options, go to tournaments.drf.com.