BETTING THE SYSTEMS : Riding a Winner From the Post Position

Miss Kitty, who has made a living shuffling and dealing in Southern California card palaces for the last 30 years, is so good at what she does that when she bets the horses or participates in other forms of gambling, people stop and listen. Tall and slender, and a bit shy, Miss Kitty doesn’t speak often. But when she does, she usually makes a lot of sense.

So if Miss Kitty says she likes to wager on post positions at the race tracks, her friends wonder why. After all, most bettors will shun post-position betting like cholera and the plague. In fact, most bettors will argue that all post positions produce the same percentage of winners over a period of time.

They claim that no post is more favorable than another in handicapping winners over a year’s racing. That no matter the distance, regardless of whether it’s the outside, the inside or the middle post, the percentage of winners is going to even out.

Some bettors even believe that post position is of little importance in analyzing the outcome of a specific race. That if the nag is going to win, it will anyway, whether it runs from the No. 1 post position or the No. 12.

If you ask the bettor about the ponies, he will tell you about the jockey, the horse’s past performances, the weight, the class, the speed rating. What he usually won’t tell you is whether the nag is on the inside, middle or outside.

In any case, Miss Kitty warns that ignoring the post position is like playing deaf and dumb when your wife says she wants to go to the Caribbean for two weeks to avoid the cold weather. You take your life in your own hands.

Depending on the track, certain post positions seem to win more often, day after day and season after season, Miss Kitty will explain if one takes her to dinner. And the more expensive the restaurant, the more she shovels in the caviar with chopped egg and onions and picks at pheasant under glass, the more you can get her to talk.

However, if you’re going to go along with Miss Kitty, you should be aware that statistics compiled on post positions could be misleading. Many tabulations are made by adding the winners every day for a particular post without taking into consideration the total starting races for each post.

Thus, when the bettors read in track programs that the greater number of winners come out of post Nos. 1, 3 and 7, for example, if they’re into the mathematics of the situation, they may play these posts more than the others. On the other hand, they may avoid them, thinking they’ve already won their share of races.

The reality of the situation is that the drop in winners in the outside posts is not caused by any kind of disadvantage in racing, as many bettors assume, but in the fact that fewer horses start in the outside posts. There are fewer 10-, 11- and 12-horse fields, for instance, than 5-, 6-, 7- and 8-horse fields. So it’s reasonable to conclude that the outside post positions automatically will get fewer winners over a season.

What the bettor should consider are the number of starts a horse makes from a post and how many wins from that post.

For example, take Hollywood Park Race Track during the 1989 season.

Only eight winners came from the No. 12 post position, about 1% winners in 612 races during the 68-day racing season. But if you figure that there were only 110 races in which the No. 12 horse competed, the percentage suddenly jumps to 7%, a big difference, particularly for system handicapping.

Here were the true win percentages for posts during the 1989 season at Hollywood Park:

1--8% (51 wins--612 races)

2--9% (58 wins--612 races)

3--10% (63 wins--612 races)

4--11% (70 wins--612 races)

5--14% (86 wins--612 races)

6--13% (78 wins--590 races)

7--13% (67 wins--507 races)

8--11% (45 wins--402 races)

9--12% (34 wins--291 races)

10--14% (31 wins--225 races)

11--12% (21 wins--174 races)

12--7% (8 wins--112 races)

13--0% (0 wins--1 race)

Hollywood Park statistics show that the No. 5 and the No. 10 post won the same percentage of races. Therefore, one or the other could have been used in a post position system. Consider No. 5, because its horse raced from the middle of the pack every race and may not have been bothered by either the inside or the outside horses.

On June 18, 1989, in the first race, a seven-furlong claiming race for 4-year-olds and up, Matthew T. Parker settled into third from the gate after coming out of the No. 5 spot. In the stretch, the horse made its move and won by a head. Its payoff was $16.80 for $2.

No. 5 also won the fourth race as Forty Niner Days captured a sprint of 5 1/2 furlongs by a nose, paying $14.80. In the fifth race, Bicker Bear lagged behind in 10th place after the start of a six-furlong dash. Soon after, the horse moved up to seventh and hit the stretch in third. Storming through the stretch, the horse ended up winning easily by 1 1/4 lengths. It paid $11.20.

The No. 5 post position won a fourth race that day. Going off the favorite, Waterscape, in a 1-mile allowance event for 3-year-olds and up, started out second in the seventh race and quickly moved to the front. It went wire to wire to win by a nose for a payoff of $4.40.

Total returns for the four races amounted to $57.20. After deducting the $2 bet on No. 5 in every race, profit for the day amounted to a neat $39.20.

On May 24, 1989, betting the No. 5 post every race was extremely frustrating, although the system ended up with a big profit for the day. Since the race that won was the ninth, system bettors also had to show a great deal of patience. In the ninth, a one-mile claiming race for fillies and mares, 4-year-olds and up, Exodus From Rome broke from the No. 5 post and, lacking speed, ended up 11th until the quarter-pole.

The horse then started moving up, getting to second in the stretch, where it gained the lead and finished with half a length to spare. For $2, system bettors received a hefty $72.80 and completed the nine races with a $54.80 profit.

Those who lost the race might say that there was more luck involved than skill, that betting a post position is just as sure a way to lose as sailing on the Lusitania or booking passage on the Titanic. But it’s only talk. After all, they blew their wad by chunking it in on the favorite. A bet Miss Kitty would never make!