Win at the Dog Track With Eb

The first time I heard someone call a dog a phony, I didn’t have a clue what they meant. How can a dog be a phony? I know a lot of people who are phonies, who act like something they’re not. But dogs don’t “act” at all. What you see is what you get with dogs.

Over time, I learned that a “phony” dog at the greyhound track is a dog who looks better than he runs. It’s not that the dog is trying to fool you or anything. It’s just that its performance can sucker you into betting it when you really shouldn’t.

An example of a phony is the dog who had won in A by six lengths and was now running in a stakes race. He looked really good, because I had seen the race where he won by a mile and he just blew by the other dogs like they were standing still.

When I bet him, he was at 4-1, but by the time the race went off, he was the favorite, even though there were some other good dogs in the race. So what happened? He was last - six lengths behind the other dogs, this time.

When I looked back over his lines at the last race where he’d won for fun, I realized that the race was a “phony” race. Sure it was an A race, but the dogs in it weren’t the cream of the crop. Most of them had just won in B or had never won in A even though they’d had a couple races in A.

The competition in the stakes race was a lot tougher. All of them had won in A, some many times. They were used to winning. The dog I bet had only won in A once and didn’t have to really try to do it.

So, he was a phony and I was a sucker for betting him. But I learned from this experience and became a better handicapper. Now, I look at the competition in every race where a dog won by a big margin. A lot of times, it’s because the other dogs are second rate, not because the winner is first rate.

The systems I use to pick winners at the dog track are The Two Key Trifecta System and The Marks Method.

You can adopt a retired racer. In return for a family of its own, your greyhound will give you lots of love. Hey, you can sit on the couch together and watch the dog races. Who knows? You might even get some inside information from your fast friend.

From the time the first caveman bet the second caveman that the woolly mammoth would beat the saber tooth tiger that was chasing him, people have been winning and losing money. Losing is no fun. Maybe that’s why a lot of people don’t want to admit that it’s their fault.

They look for outside reasons for why that sure-thing didn’t come in. I’ve heard a lot of stories about how races are fixed. Some sound kind of logical, but some are pretty far out. Have you heard the one about the guy on the roof with the ray gun?

I first heard it at a track in New England where a stooper (someone who bends over looking for winning tickets that were thrown away by accident) swore to me that he’d seen the guy. “He had a green jacket on and a gimme hat and he was pointing that ray gun at he dogs. Just as he did that, the lead dog slowed down and the second dog crashed into it and there went my quiniela.”

“So how does this ray gun work?” I asked him. “How does it slow down the dogs?”

He just shrugged and moved off, looking for winning tickets on the floor. “I think it’s some kind of cosmic ray,” he yelled back to me.

I don’t think so. I think that it might have been someone clocking the dogs with a radar gun to check their speed. Or it might have been someone out on the roof for a smoke, with a big old cigar or something else in their hand and his imagination did the rest.

I’m not so naive as to think that no one ever attempts to fix a race at the dog track. I’m sure with that much money around, greedy or desperate people give it a go from time to time. One thing I do know though from working for track kennels is that the owners and trainers would never do anything to permanently harm a dog. They’d be hurting themselves if they did.

They spend a lot of money, time and effort working to get dogs to the point where they make money. They’d be stupid to waste their time and effort trying to “nobble” dogs instead of working to make them faster and smarter about racing.

That said, I’ll admit that some of the races I’ve watched have been screwy to the point where I ask myself if someone wasn’t messing with the dogs. But then I go home and watch my usually graceful Black Lab chase her tennis ball and she manages to run into it and gets bopped on the head and I realize that even greyhounds can make mistakes when they’re running at 45 mph or more with their minds on catching the lure and nothing else.

The systems I use to pick winners at the dog track are The Two Key Trifecta System and The Marks Method.

You can adopt a retired racer. In return for a family of its own, your greyhound will give you lots of love. Hey, you can sit on the couch together and watch the dog races. Who knows? You might even get some inside information from your fast friend.

I went to the dog track for the first time in Rhode Island. Everyone knows that it’s the smallest state, but they may not know that it has enough weather for several large states. The winters often go from below freezing to the fifties overnight. The summers have some of the most humid weather on the eastern seaboard and ninetie’s aren’t unusual, although it can drop to the forties at night.

The weather certainly had an effect on those of us who lived there, so I knew it’d have an effect on the greyhounds’ performance, but it took me a little while to figure out just how that played out. I did it by going to the track in all kinds of weather, year round, and observing how the dogs reacted.

The first thing I noticed was that breakers - dogs who leap out of the box and rush to the lead - didn’t always break as well when it was cold. They seemed to have trouble getting their muscles to give them that burst of energy that they need to get off to a good start, maybe because their muscles were slower to warm up in cold weather.

That’s when I paid more attention to closers, dogs who gain speed and position at the end of the race. Because they get out more slowly, their muscles seem to have time to “warm up” and get up to speed, so their running style still works well in cold weather.

The next thing I noticed is that some dogs just don’t like wet weather. If it rained, I learned not to bet on them, because they’d be at the back of the pack, falling further behind as they tried to get as far back as they could from the mud being slung at them from the dogs in front.

Like a beagle that I once had, some dogs just don’t like having water or mud splashed on them. Other dogs, like my Black Lab, don’t even seem to notice. They run through puddles and mud like it’s not even there. These are the kind of greyhound that you want to bet on when it’s pouring and the track is a mudhole.

Another thing that affects some dogs more than others is wind. The track at Twin River in RI was built in a big open area and the stretch was like a wind tunnel when the wind was coming from the right direction. You could actually see the dogs slow down when they rounded the last turn and got into that wind. Some dogs took it in stride, so to speak, and put on a burst of speed to compensate. But some dogs didn’t have anything left and lost ground from there to the wire.

Wherever you live, even in a climate like the Southwest or South, the weather isn’t always the same. When it changes, it’s a good idea to make a note of how it affects the dogs and bet accordingly. You don’t want to be left out in the cold when it comes to greyhound handicapping.

If you’ve been around greyhound handicapping for any length of time, you know the myth I’m talking about. But some of the newer players may not know that something that many people tell you is the best way to make money at the track is actually the surest way to go broke.

It’s been around for hundreds of years anywhere that people bet. You can find it at Cannes where high society bets on the roll of a roulette wheel. It’s there at the Kentucky Derby and the English Derby and in Australia, Asia and New Zealand. Irish punters tell each other what a great system it is as they bet on their top dogs. Harness racing fans in New Jersey swear that it works because they knew someone who knew someone who had a brother in law who used it and got rich.

Well, I’d like to meet that guy, because he’s the only one who ever HAS gotten rich off this system. Yet, everyday at race tracks and casinos all over the world, people are still buying this losing system and still using it to lose yet more money. The only people who get rich on it are the sleazeballs who sell it.

So, what is this system? Well, it has several names. You might know of it as the Martingale System. Another name for it is the Doubling System. That’s a good name for it because it describes how it works. Basically, if you lose a bet, you double the next bet and keep doing that until you hit a winning bet.

When you do, you get back all the money you lost and make money also. It sounds plausible, until you realize that - if you have several losing bets in a row - you’ll run out of money unless you have infinite resources, which most of us don’t have.

It was originally based on a simple game of tossing a coin with small wagers, but it quickly became popular with bettors who played other types of games, including those who wagered on horses and dogs. I heard about it from a fellow dog player on my second trip to the greyhound track back in the 1970’s. He swore he made money with it and offered to sell it to me for $10.

I passed and watched him try the same trick with other new dog players for years. I can only assume that - if he did make money on the Martingale System - he was doing it by selling it to unsuspecting newbies. In conclusion, I’d like to recommend that you use a variation on the opposite of the Martingale System.

If you bet smaller bets when you’re losing and larger bets when you’re winning, you’ll have a much better chance of keeping your losses to a minimum and your winnings to a maximum. This is the only money management system that I’ve ever found that really works over the long term.

The systems I use to pick winners at US dog tracks are The Two Key Trifecta System and The Marks Method.

You can adopt a retired racer. In return for a family of its own, your greyhound will give you lots of love. Hey, you can sit on the couch together and watch the dog races. Who knows? You might even get some inside information from your fast friend.

When you look at a greyhound race, there are so many factors that it’s hard to know which one is most important. Post position, class, percentage of wins, quinielas and trifecta percentages. And, of course, you have to consider each dog’s running style and how it relates to the other dogs’ running style in this race.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a shortcut or two that would make it easier to pick dogs that are real contenders? Or, even better, wouldn’t it be great if you could throw out some non-contenders before you really got down to a closer look at the dogs who have a shot in this race?

Well, in my experience over 30 years of greyhound handicapping, in some races, there are a couple of shortcuts that almost always work to weed out dogs who really don’t have a chance. First of all, find a dog who’s moving up in grade.

Look at the dog’s last two races. If the dog moved up in grade and hasn’t done better than third place, I’d leave that dog out of my bets. Why? I figure that the dog isn’t ready - for what ever reason - for the competition he’s facing in this grade. Maybe he’s a young dog, just moving up for the first time and he needs more experience or just more races to find his feet.

Maybe he’s an older dog who’s slowing down and needs to be at a lower grade to come in. Or maybe he’s just not the caliber to run with the grade he’s in today and never will be. It really doesn’t matter, in this race, why he doesn’t have it. What matters is that you don’t want to bet on dogs that aren’t likely to come in.

The other dog I won’t bet on is the kind of dog that somehow manages to stay in a grade by just winning or running in the money often enough so that it doesn’t drop down. This kind of dog can drive you nuts, because every once in awhile, it WILL come in and you won’t have it and you’ll curse me for telling you not to bet on it.

But keep in mind, that if you bet it every time it runs, you’d lose money. Sure, it comes in, but very inconsistently. You really don’t want to bet this dog when it’s just won, because it’s not likely to win back-to-back races, believe me.

There are other dogs that I never bet on, but these two are at the top of my list. You won’t find these dogs in your picks when you use The Two Key Trifecta System and The Marks Method.

You can adopt a retired racer. In return for a family of its own, your greyhound will give you lots of love. Hey, you can sit on the couch together and watch the dog races. Who knows? You might even get some inside information from your fast friend.