When I was 11, my mom thought it would be fun to go to the track for Mother’s Day. Someone showed me how to read the DRF in a cursory sort of way and let me pick my own horse and placed a $2 bet for me. It was supposed to be a life lesson on how gambling is not a good way to use your money, but I won on a longshot and it paid off huge- something like $30, which is a lot of money when you’re in sixth grade. Thus began my terrible descent into a low-level gambling problem.
So, unlike, say, roulette, you can’t just point to black or red and hope for the best. There’s no way to be good at picking out your horse since this is, after all, a game of chance, but there are ways to not be bad at it. At the end of the day, there’s no such thing as a sure thing, and the favorite may come in dead last. You just can’t know. All my guidelines for being a fool less likely to be parted with his money are after the jump. Continue reading
