Mispriced Props @ Sportsbook?
TommyL
Member
Wanted to get some thoughts (and/or alert any of your with an account at Sportsbook.com or anyone that mirrors them) on a prop that I found. Under Horse Props -> Summer at Saratoga, they have several props up for 7 of the big weekend Stakes. The prop that I played on each one was..."Will the Top Three Horses all be Even or Odd numbers?". The "No" on this prop is at -160 for each of the seven races (which give us a breakeven of it happening about 38% of the time). Based on some rough calculations, I'd see it happening in the 20-25% range, meaning that it should be priced closer to -350. Is there something that I'm missing, or is the -160 price way off on this one? If anyone likes, I can go into more details of my calculations, but just wanted to get some thoughts from others. Thanks.
Comments
Lol, exactly. A bit over my head there with all the math. Personally, i'm not sure why they would even offer a prop like that to begin with. The one thing i would be looking for is whether they plan to keep the prop up after entries have been taken, then you might be able to react accordingly.
This is what I was thinking. Also keep in mind that many stakes fields will show up with an odd number of entrants, allowing odd numbers to have a small advantage of finishing 1-2-3. Once post draws occur, this could be a gift either way, although I strongly doubt the props will remain up.
The odds already moved up to -200, and I'm sure it'll continue to rise as people figure out that it's mispriced (that is if anyone else is actually looking at this kind of stuff this far in advance). I didn't play this from any type of handicapping angle, purely a statistical one.
With a 13 horse field, my numbers show the odds of this losing as being 19.2%. That's the worst case for this prop (having 13 horses that is). Things like the post draw, coupled entries, scratches, etc could certainly hurt us, but they can also help us. Either way, I don't see those things playing enough of a role to take it past the point of breakeven (which right now, at -200, would be 33.3%).
There are some other props there that might be able to be exploited, but some handicapping knowledge would be needed. They are things like "Winning Horse name begins with (A-M) or (N-Z), both at -120", "Winning Trainer Last Name begins with (A-M) or (N-Z), both at -120", or "Will a Horse lead wire to wire (YES) or (NO), with YES being +400 and NO -700". Knowing some more about what horse are being pointed to some of these races might make those plays valuable. For example, is there one of these races that should have a very heavy favorite, or should have 2-3 strong contenders trained by Baffert, Lucas, Mott (all A-M)? The 7 races that they have the props up for are the Fourstardave, Adirondack, Saratoga Special, Alabama, Sword Dancer, and Travers.