Winning At the Dog Track: How To Tell If A Dog is Ready To Win
If you’ve been going to the dog track for any length of time, there are probably moments when you ask yourself if the races are fixed. You bet on a dog that has dropped down from A into B, has good early speed, has good win and quiniela percentages and is a favorite with the bettors. This dog has everything going for it, including being in a race where none of the other dogs should be able to outbreak it. But they do. Big time.
He comes in fourth and, as you rip up your ticket and call him a pig, you wonder how the hell a good dog like that can run such a lousy race one day when he was competing and beating “A” dogs just a week or so ago. As you leave the track, you think to yourself, “They did something to make this dog lose. I know they did.” Maybe. I won’t say that where there’s as much money at stake as there is at the dog track that people don’t try to pull some funny stuff.
But it’s more likely that the dog just wasn’t ready to win that day. Maybe, he was recently wormed. Maybe he’d recently gotten an immunization. Hey, I don’t know about your dog, but my Black Lab sleeps for hours after she gets her yearly shots and she’s not really herself for a few days. Why would greyhounds be any different?
So, how the heck can you tell, when you see a dog that looks good, whether it’s likely to come in or just go through the motions? Well, there are indications if you know what to look for. The biggest thing I look for in a dog is whether it’s showed any - what I call “spark” - in its last couple of races.
Did the dog break? Did it close a couple places near the end of the race? Did it have a line like “determined effort” or “tried throughout”? Or did its line say something like “followed pace” or “dull effort”? If it looks like the dog made an effort to win in its last race, I figure that it might do something in today’s race.
If it just “phoned in” its performance the last time it ran, I’m not going to put money on it today. If it didn’t break, didn’t close, didn’t seem to even know that there was a lure running in front of it, my money stays in my pocket. But if it had that spark in its last two or three races, then I look to see - in addition to a good attitude - whether it has anything else going for it in this race.
Is its post position one that it likes to be in? Is it better than the post positions where it didn’t do anything? If it runs the rail, is it in an inside box or are the dogs between it and the rail slower to get out than it is? If it likes midtrack, will it be able to break out of the box and take the lead or is there another dog to its right that slashes in to the rail? Or is there a dog to its left that always breaks out of the box and slashes to the right to go way outside? If so, it won’t have the advantage it needs to win today.
I also look at the dogs it’s racing with compared to the dogs it has been racing with in the races where it didn’t come in. Are they solid grade, for instance “B” if the dog is running in that grade today, or are most of them moving up from “C”? If they are, the dog has an advantage because it’s been running with “A” dogs. These are the things I look for that tell me whether a dog is ready to win or not.
One thing that I pay no attention to is the odds on the dog. I don’t care whether the other bettors like the dog or hate it. Why? Because I know that 90% of the crowd loses at the dog track. That doesn’t mean that the crowd is always wrong, but it does mean that betting on crowd favorites isn’t a good way to pick dogs. I prefer to use my own handicapping techniques which, so far, have put me in the 10% of bettors who know how to tell if a dog is ready to win.
The systems I use to pick winners at the dog track are The Marks Method and the Two Key Trifecta System
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.
