Are you talking win bets or place bets? For win bets it is not that hard to work out (but hard to find the right bets to make a profit!).

For win bets the usual way to work out bet sizes for this type of thing is to have a "target amount" that you want to achieve for the race and then divide that by the price for each horse. For example lets say your 5 horses have prices of $3.50, $6.00, $8.00, $10.00 and $15.00. You could set a target dividend of $50.00 - then you just divide that $50.00 by each price to get the bet amount for each horse. So on first selection you would bet $50.00/$3.50 = $14.00, second selection is $50/$6 = $8 etc. This would give your bet amounts of $14, $8, $6, $5 and $3 (rounding to nearest dollar). So your total bet amount would be $36 and your dividend would be between $45 and $54 (depending on the winner).

The main problem you have with this is getting a high enough strike rate without only selecting favourites. In the above example you are getting between $9 and $18 profit on a $36 bet - you would need about a 75% strike rate in the long run for this to be workable. If you have 50% strike rate than you would need your total bet to be no more than $25 (for your $50 target) - this means the ave. div. you need to be working on is about $10. If your average div is less than this then I suggest you probably need to work on reducing your selections a bit more rather than trying to bet on them all.

If you are talking about place bets then it gets a bit harder as you have to work out your average number of winners per race so you can work out the target for each runner.

[ This Message was edited by: becareful on 2002-05-17 11:29 ]