By Jim Freer
So, you want to make money on the Preakness but don’t want to or can’t afford to bet more than about $30.
And you’d like to include some exacta and trifecta bets that offer the prospect of big payoffs.
Meanwhile, it would be good to balance that with some hedge bets built around one of the favorites winning. But your $30 is not enough to reach those goals.
A solution, for which there is still considerable time to act prior to late Saturday afternoon, is to get several friends and relatives to join you—each putting in $20, $25 or $30 to build some critical mass into your bets.
We have been part of such team bets for several years in Triple Crown races and other major races. On most of those races, we have made at least a small profit.
We began publishing our recommended bets in 2014.
For the Preakness, we had returns on investment of 62.5 percent in 2014 and 40 percent in 2015. We will have details in a follow-up article on Friday night.
Our bets are primarily exacta boxes and part wheels and trifecta boxes and part wheels, ranging from $1 to $5 per combination.
In a race of Preakness size, eleven horses, a starting point is almost always to find two horses as keys in the top spot.
Then, find two or three horses that you think have a decent shot to win and make sure to have all of them in the second spot in the exacta and in the second and third spots in the trifecta.
Unless you want to roll some dice, Nyquist and Exaggerator are obvious horses for the first two spots in the Preakness.
In an 11-horse race, we always recommend having at least three horses in an exacta box
Later this Saturday morning we will have stories that, we hope, will help you identify your other horses for exacta boxes and other Preakness bets.
We will follow that with our recommended bets, our Preakness picks and the picks of other racing writers and handicappers.
