Wednesday 11 July 2012

Where Is The Thrill In Horse Racing?


Sports betting has always been something that I have liked to play around with and often place bets on the football games throughout the Premier League season but with the rise in sports betting revenues increasing year on year and the fact that mobile sports betting is expected to carry further growth, reports claiming it could be as high as $45 billion ayear by 2017, where is the attraction in betting on sports such as horse racing?

I have always tried to be cautious when it comes to gambling and tend to look for bets in which I think carry a low risk but these often return low profits but a profit is a win however you look at it, but when it comes to horse racing, especially in the races that carry a larger number of runners, the betting odds seem to go firmly out of the window!

I recently took a trip to the races close to where I work and although the night was great, the horse betting aspect seemed to leave me completely baffled, there were odds on favourites coming in last place, the firm outsiders rushing towards the finish line in first place and generally a complete miss match of odds and tips that seemed to leave punters guessing rather than betting in the know.

Now I guess that this is all part and parcel of the horse race betting experience but for me even the lure of free betting offers and promotions online aren’t enough to make me even think about betting on the horses at any other time than with friends at the racecourse, but there were avid gamblers that were genuinely dropping thousands of pounds as races finished.

Now it might be down to the relationship that I am in but the thought of having to walk into my house and face the wife with the news that I have just dropped £3k on the horses and have come home with little more than a stinking hangover to show for it, scares the life out of me.

I think that I’ll stick to something a little less unpredictable and keep winning in smaller chunks of profit rather than looking to back that outsider at 120/1 and seeing them coming flying past the winners post…