Win at the Dog Track With Eb

Joe and Bob both go to one of my favorite tracks. I see them there all the time, sitting at a table near the window that looks out over the finish line. You’d know the track if I mentioned it, but its name doesn’t matter. I’m sure there are plenty of “Joe’s” and “Bob’s” at your favorite track.

Bob drinks coffee by the gallon and smokes outside between races. He’s a nervous kind of guy. Always moving around, tapping his pen on the table, clearing his throat, tapping his foot. He’d drive Joe crazy if they hadn’t been friends for so long that Joe doesn’t even notice it any more.

While Bob flips back and forth through his program, looking for really good-looking winners, Joe carefully and methodically handicaps his program with a system that he’s been using for years. It hasn’t made him rich, but it helps him consistently pick winners, quinielas and sometimes trifectas. It’s the reason he goes home a little richer at the end of the day.

Bob, on the other hand, doesn’t believe in systems. He thinks they’re all rip-offs and scams. He likes to handicap the program himself. After all, he’s been going to the dog races for twenty years, so who knows more about how to pick winners than he does?

Well, apparently, a lot of people do, because they take Bob’s money every time he goes to the track. Sometimes, he makes a few dollars, but over the long haul, Bob loses from $20 to $75 dollars on most of his track trips. He’s a loser and a lousy handicapper, but he’ll never admit it.

When he gets home and his wife asks him if he won anything, he always says, “I won a little.” He’s lying and his wife knows it, but she loves him and doesn’t give him a hard time. She wishes he’d get a clue about how to pick dogs though, because she knows he hates losing.

Joe’s wife knows that he wins more than he loses, because he tells her what he lost and what he won. He talks a little about the dogs that made him money that day, but only a little, because he doesn’t want to bore her to tears. He knows she just wants to know if he won or lost, not every little detail.

Joe’s wife was a little doubtful back when Joe bought a lot of handicapping books and reports, but now she’s glad that Joe did. It gives him an advantage that the other bettors don’t have. Bob’s wife wishes Bob would get a clue and find someone who could help him figure out the dog races.

Joe and Bob are both smart, sharp and determined to make money at the dog track. One of them will make money at the track, and the other one could if he’d get a winning strategy for greyhound handicapping. If you’re like Joe, you know what I’m talking about. If you’re like Bob, what are you going to do about winning at the dog track?

To win at the dog track, you need a winning system. You can learn the basics of handicapping from a program or online, but to really make good money at the dog track consistently, you need proven Greyhound Handicapping Systems.

In return for a family of its own, a retired racing 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.

To win at the dog track, you need a winning system. You can learn the basics of handicapping from a program or online, but to really make good money at the dog track consistently, you need proven Greyhound Handicapping Systems.

In return for a family of its own, a retired racing 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.

If you were a greyhound, would you be a sprinter or a router? Are you fast out of the box, but then fade in the stretch? Or do you start out slowly, gain speed and really pour it on at the end? Dogs have different styles of running and bettors have different betting styles also.

I’m a router. I take a while to go over a program. I examine each race, carefully looking for the factors that I use to throw out three or four dogs, before I get down to really handicapping. If you’re a router, you probably take an hour or more to go over your program.

Sprinters, on the other hand, open their programs, glance over each race, looking for winners and quickly flipping to the next race where they do the same thing. They can “go over” a program in five minutes or less.

However, when it comes to winning, routers like me do a lot better than sprinters do. We do a much better job of weighing the dogs’ odds of running in the money. When the races go off, we have more information to work with as we figure out what to bet and even WHETHER to bet.

That’s a very important difference between handicappers who take their time and speedballs who rush through their programs. If you go too fast, you miss things. If you only look for winners, you don’t know enough about the other dogs to really decide which dog is best.

I’m not saying there aren’t people who are good at making snap judgments. Some people are very good at analyzing data quickly. But, even so, there’s enough data on a program page to take even the fastest handicapper at least fifteen minutes a race.

If you find that you’re finished going over a race in less than fifteen minutes, you might want to think about doing a more in-depth job of handicapping. Ask yourself if you’re missing essential information by just scanning, instead of really reading, the dogs’ lines.

Maybe it would help if you went over the races a second time. Maybe you should think about leaving yourself more time to go over the program by buying it or printing it out earlier. Or maybe you’re doing your greyhound handicapping with friends and paying more attention to them than to your program.

The bottom line is that there’s only so much you can absorb in five minutes. If you’re sprinting through your program, slow down and really take in the information that helps you make money - or lose it.

To win at the dog track, you need a winning system. You can learn the basics of handicapping from a program or online, but to really make good money at the dog track consistently, you need proven Greyhound Handicapping Systems.

In return for a family of its own, a retired racing 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.

How many programs do you have in your car? In your bathroom? In your trash can? Your answers could be a real tipoff as to why you’re not winning money at the greyhound track. Rather than costing you money - a dollar at most tracks - programs can be a goldmine if you save them and use them to win another day.

Even if you print your programs off the Internet, like I do, they still cost you something. Not just the paper and ink that your printer uses to print them. They also cost you time. Time to go over them. Time to handicap them. Time to mark down who you’re betting on and why.

You DO mark up your program pages, right? Whatever system you use must call for some kind of notation, so there’s no way your program should be unmarked when you throw it on the floor because you lost on the last race. Oops, I mean, it should be marked when you put it into your pocket and take it home with you so that you can go over it later when you’ve gotten over being angry at losing on the last race.

Getting angry is normal when you lose. But if you just get angry and complain and rant about your lousy luck and how the races are rigged, you won’t be any wiser as to why you lost when you go back to the track again. And no matter what you say when you leave after losing, most bettors go back and I’m betting that you will too.

So, next time you go to the track, take notes. Write down what happened in each race that you bet on. If you can, make a note about what happened to the dog you bet on. Did it break but get blocked? Did it run a good race but just get outclassed at the end? This is stuff you’ll want to know the next time that dog runs in a race.

If you write it down while it’s fresh in your mind, you won’t forget it or mis-remember it. The best greyhound handicappers in the world all take notes. It’s not like in the movies where they stand there with a far-off look in their eyes and “pull a dog’s name off the top of their heads” and bet on it and it comes in.

Take notes. Go over them. Work what the notes tell you in with whatever handicapping system you have. After a while, you’ll get used to reminding yourself about important handicapping factors that you notice. Believe me, I’ve been writing notes to myself for over 30 years and I can tell you that it’s a very important key to picking winners.

To win at the dog track, you need a winning system. You can learn the basics of handicapping from a program or online, but to really make good money at the dog track consistently, you need proven Greyhound Handicapping Systems.

In return for a family of its own, a retired racing 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.