Chrome Prince,

Your Maths are very, very, very wrong.

A horse that is 1.50 does not have a 22% chance of coming first, 22% chance of coming second and 22% chance of coming third. Your thinking too simply.

Here is a better example of understanding.

Lets take a horse that is priced $4.00 for the win and $1.50 for the place.
The horse has a win chance of 25% (1/4) assuming a 100% priced market. So its placing 2nd and 3rd is actually 66% - 25% = 41%. Divide this by 2 and you have 20.5% which is already worse then your 22%.

Another horse that is priced $2.50 for the win and $1.50 for the place.
The horse has a win chance of 40% (1/2.5) assuming a 100% priced market. So its placing 2nd and 3rd is actually 66% - 40% =26%. Divide this by 2 and you have 13% which is really worse then your 22%.

My examples above are very simple and really a bad way to rate a placing chance. In fact I would say they are very very wrong too. What you want to understand is who won the race leaving a percentage for 2nd and 3rd.

Lets use my $4 priced horse first. Lets say it didn't win but a horse priced $10 wins. We can then determine our horses chance of running second. We know it didn't win the race and a 10% chance did so that means we are 0.90/4 = 22.5% chance of running second. A horse paying $20 (5%) runs in second. We now have a 0.85/4= 21.25% chance of running third.

In the above example its close to your 22% for each place. But here is the problem. Lets say a $5 horse wins (1/5 = 20%) leaving us a 0.8/4 = 20 % chance of running second and lets assume a $6 chance actually ran 2nd. this leaves us with a (0.8-.16)/4= 16% chance of running third.

We can do the above again with our $2.50 chance. If the horse which ran first was a $10 horse and the horse which ran 2nd was a $20 horse then our $2.50 horse has a 0.85/2.5 = 34% chance of running third. If the first horse was a $5 horse and the 2nd horse was a $6 horse then we had a (0.8-0.16)/2.5 = 25.6% chance of running third. In these instances its much higher then your 22%.


I hope my maths above is correct but it should give you the basis of the idea of determining how to correctly price a place chance. What you need to do is run every permutation of the field with the horse your pricing not running a place. This gives you a semi accurate price. I say semi accurate as I am assuming the win prices are the correct % chances of a horse winning. Some horses are those types which either win or don't run a place and this will screw this pricing. Also you are going to get some fav-longshot bias affecting the prices which you may need to account for.

Understanding how to correctly determine a horses place chances is very important if you want to bet/lay in the place markets.

So in summary as I know the examples above are heavy reading your horses chance of running third for a $1.50 chance depends on

a) its win chance
b) the odds of the chance which ran first
c) the odds of the chance which ran second.

I am happy to discuss further if you need more help with this.

If you give me a race with 7 horses or less that you have looked at (provide all win odds at time of looking) I can go through the working to determine the place price of your selected horse that you would intend to back or lay.