Stupid Question

[YoungBuck]

Just confirming something.

If a horse at odds of 20.00 has around 5% chance of winning a race,
if I was to back three 20.00 horses in the one race, would my chances of
one of those winning rise to 15%?

[jfc]

Just confirming something.

If a horse at odds of 20.00 has around 5% chance of winning a race,
if I was to back three 20.00 horses in the one race, would my chances of
one of those winning rise to 15%?

Correct.

You can add such chances together.

Whereas adding odds (the inverse of chance) is nonsensical. Yet too many people like making that mistake.

[crash]

A horse at $20 though might have a 1% chance or 60% of winning, not specifically 5%. You can't work out genuine chance by price or the shortest price horse should win most races which they don't. They mostly lose. Genuine % chance of any runner regardless of odds is speculation only.

[YoungBuck]

Thanks for the input guys.

[partypooper]

Crash, whilst what you say is correct, don't you think it's "strange" that overall the difference between the price and the return is about the bookies take???? i.e just under 50% 0f even money chances win (regardless) just under 33% of 2-1 chances win (regardless), as you go up in odds the gap widens, overall the diff is around 18-20% (surprise surprise), were talking pure mathematics here. Take Favs only and the loss is around 8-10% (regardless) it can be narrowed as we all know by price shopping, but the those statisical facts are interesting in themselves??? .........sort of "sobering in a way" as it suggests that by the time you have backed say 1000 x 3-1 chances, (regardless of how they arrived at) you will lose about 12-15%, same thing with 100 x 4-1 chances, 5-1 etc etc.