Tourney field size affects picks

One of the most popular features of the DRF Tournaments website is the free games that take place every week. Sometimes they offer an opportunity for players to start their journeys to the World Championship of Handicapping. Others are events like the one last Saturday, sponsored by Laurel Park, that offer up site credit. Others still offer credit for DRF Bets customers exclusively.

These free tournaments are great because they give you a rare chance to get something for nothing. But they’re obviously very difficult to win because of the massive field sizes. DRF Tournaments offers plenty of chances in paid tournaments for players to win prizes by finishing in the top 10 percent of fields, or even the top 5 percent of fields. But in these free rolls, the ratio becomes more like three or five in 1,000.

One way to look at these games is to consider the amount you need to increase your starting bankroll in order to win a prize. In a 10-race $2 win-place contest, every player essentially starts with $40 ($4 per race times 10 races). With a ratio of 1 in 5, you might need only 1.5 times your initial bankroll ($60 or less) to get a prize. In a 1,000-entrant contest, it’s safe to say three times your starting bankroll ($120) is a better target.

How does this change the strategy?

There are two main schools of thought. One is that picking price horses becomes more important than ever. And it’s certainly true that against a big field, if you’re torn between two runners, it makes sense to go with the longer one reflexively. This contrasts with a 1-in-5 or 1-in-10 contest, where there’s much more of an emphasis on picking winners and getting points. Against a large field, it’s rare to see a player finishing high up on the leaderboard without multiple cashes of at least $20 or more.

There is another theory about how to play these giant fields, and it’s pretty straightforward. Don’t worry about prices at all, and simply try to pick the winner of every race. If the horse you like is a longshot, by all means, you can play it. But you can also feel free to try to stack winners and build a winning total that way by the horseplayer’s equivalent of pitching a perfect game.

According to the math, the first route is easier to accomplish than the second, but the problem is that some players just don’t find horses that often at the longer end of the price spectrum. For this group, the second strategy makes more sense. Rather than trying to change your game completely and reach for horses you don’t actually “like,” go ahead and play the horses you usually play, knowing to err on the longer side when you’re caught between options. The good news is that it’s a free roll, so it doesn’t really matter anyway.

The above advice applies whether you’re playing in an all-in tournament (where picks lock) or a live one (where picks can be changed as you go). In the live format, you have the luxury of seeing how the sequence unfolds and playing accordingly. But in live games, you’ll want to be careful not to hit the panic button too early. Just because a player hits a cap horse early doesn’t mean you should start reaching right away. There will still be time to catch up, and how you choose to build the total you’re going to need essentially remains the same.

Whichever strategy you choose, there are plenty of games in which to try it out for free on tournaments.drf.com.