Exacta Betting

If like me you have ever wondered about playing the exotic bets, those are the bets that are mostly placed at the Tote such as Trifectas and Placepots etc, then I have recently been looking at Exacta betting over the last few weeks, there have been a good few winning bets at half decent prices.

The Exacta bet is where you pick two or more horses in a combination to finish 1st and 2nd in the correct order. Now you can choose as many horses as you wish but this will always increase the number of bets that you must place.

For example if you choose 6 horses and combine them to have one finish first and one finish second then this will add up to 30 bets, if you choose £1 per bet then obviously you will have to lay out £30 which is quite a lot of money for one bet despite the fact that you have six horses covered and a winner at 5/1 with the second at 8/1 can pay out over £40 however with this bet you do not get your stake back.

So I started thinking about how to narrow down the field and see which horses made the frame, first and second more often. Well obviously, the more favoured horses finish better than the outsiders most of the time, especially if you find races with a smaller number of runners, again increasing your chances of success.

What I also looked to do was find a banker selection so that it wouldn’t mean I had to combine too many selections meaning that my stake wasn’t too high but also that the payout was worth winning.

So I decided to pick the favourite as the banker BUT not to finish first but to finish second. This means that a horse who wins when the favourite comes second will be at a bigger price meaning, hopefully, that the exacta will be worth winning.

I then decided that just four to six bets per race were sufficient, so I also pick the second, third, fourth, fifth (and possibly sixth and seventh) favourite to beat the favourite meaning I have just a small number of bets like the following:

2nd fav to beat the fav
3rd fav to beat the fav
4th fav to beat the fav
5th fav to beat the fav
6th fav to beat the fav

You can add as many in fact to the bet that you wish but the above gives a nice 5 bets which is quite affordable at £1 a bet.

I also decided to cut down on the number of runners in each race I was going to bet on and came up with between 7 and 10. Betting on the Exacta with a large number of runners is nigh on impossible despite the favourable payouts but I am looking at winning smaller amounts but more of the time and as I said earlier it has been paying off pretty well, even in the last couple of days.

14th April

2.50 Pontefract: 14/1 beat Evs fav and paid £20.80

3.50 Pontefract: 20/1 beat 2/1 fav and paid £80.40

5.50 Pontefract: 8/1 beat 4/1 fav and paid £50.40

2.40 Exeter: 3/1 beat 6/4 fav and paid £10.30

15th April

1.50 Newmarket: 8/1 beat 2/1 fav and paid £27.50

3.35 Newmarket: 11/2 beat 10/3 fav and paid £15.90

2.10 Cheltenham: 6/1 beat 15/8 fav and paid £19.50

8.35 Kempton: 15/2 beat 7/4 fav and paid £27.10

Summary of Exacta Betting

So as you can see, all of these were winning bets and cost just £5 each. There were also some losers too but I would possibly narrow down the field again by choosing only races where the favourite is not too big a price so it has a better chance of coming in the frame and making a winning bet.

You can play around the number of bets that you have as well as which horse you want to be your banker bet but hopefully you can utilise this banker Exacta bet to your advantage.