I'm glad that you have enough discipline and treat the losses as price of admission! But unfortunately not everyone can manage that.
Take your example, if someone comes out ahead from the first two days by betting on the favourites, what are the odds that they think "well that's easy profit, I'll just bet on all the favourites from now on!" and proceed to lose all their winnings (and potentially more).
Of course if you know the ins and outs of the horse racing industry you can make much more informed choices and enforce much more sophisticated strategies than the wider public. But consistently successfully profiting from gambling with bookmakers is not a real thing. They would have restricted you well before you can consistently profit from it.
Last week, Cheltenham hosted one of the largest horse racing events in the UK. Gambling plays a significant role at the festival, so I plotted the outcome of 4 different strategies that a gambler may implement during the event. They are:
Favourite only: Bet £10 on the pre-race favourite of every race
2nd to 5th: Bet £2.50 on the 2nd to 5th pre-race favourite of every race
All horses except Top 5: Split £10 across the horses that are not in the top 5 and bet on all of them equally (So if there are 10 horses, bet £2.00 on the 6th to 10th pre-race favourite)
All horses: Split £10 across all horses and bet on all of them equally (If there are 10 horses, bet £1.00 on each of them)
The empirical expected values of the strategies are 73.5%, 76.3%, 61.8%, 70.2% respectively.
A few notes:
Odds are calculated with Industry Starting Price, which is close to the median price of all major bookmakers in the UK
If there is a tie between 1st and 2nd, the stake is split evenly among the two horses. No other tie in prices relevant to this calculation occurs.
Gambling is a scam. You are expected to loss around £3 to the bookmaker for every £10 you gamble, which is far worse than most slots (they tend to have EV of at least 90%)
GoSouthCourt OP t1_jctxhco wrote
Reply to comment by PII-Throwaway-878 in [OC] Gambling is a mug's game: How 4 different strategies panned out at one of the UK's largest gambling events of 2023, the Cheltenham Festival (more info in comments) by GoSouthCourt
I'm glad that you have enough discipline and treat the losses as price of admission! But unfortunately not everyone can manage that.
Take your example, if someone comes out ahead from the first two days by betting on the favourites, what are the odds that they think "well that's easy profit, I'll just bet on all the favourites from now on!" and proceed to lose all their winnings (and potentially more).