Playing the Ponies

One of the items on the Singapore to-do list was to attend the horse races. They opened a new track about 10 years ago plus I wanted to see if they ran the opposite direction since the cars drive on the other side of the road.....they don't. The track prohibits anyone under 18 from entering, which took the family out of the picture. Which is sad because they enjoy it in Texas.

So my roommate Mark and I went out Sunday. We arrived a few minutes before the 3rd race and used our MRT subway cards to get in, like a train turnstile.

Once inside we looked for a race program and some odds. Well you have to buy a program outside before you come in. Don't ask, it's Asia. Anyway we leave, got one, re-enter and quickly scanned race 3. I found a few potentials and saw a horse trained by B Dean so was sold. I went to the betting window with about 1 minute to post time and asked for a Show bet on horse 8. The lady said that I needed to fill out a ticket to place a bet. There were a stack of scantron/lottery ticket looking forms next to the window with track, race, horse number, units (?) and type of bet: Win, Place, Forecast, Trierce, Trio, Quartet and Quadro....but no Show.

I went to window and said "I want a 3rd place bet, I want to bet on the horse that will finish 3rd or better." The response, for those of you from Singapore will not surprise you. No, not "Can not" but "Ehh?" This is the standard old person response to any white person's question. Taxi driver, hawker stall, it doesn't matter. Even if they understand they will still ask this anyway. Well the bet didn't happen and the race went off. My horse won and I would have collected $24. Oh well.

Mark and I walked around a found a display of brochures on the types of bets so we picked up one of each and sat down to read. Turned out a "Place" bet is betting the horse will "place" in first, second or third. OK, this is my Show bet. I like to win more frequently but only win in small amounts. Makes it more fun I think. Next was figuring out odds. Here is what we found:

First I thought this was just their records, so that #12 horse is a rockstar! Won every week of the year for 7 years straight! I am used to odds like 2 to 1, or 3-1 or 3-2, not 176. So we figured out they don’t use “odds” they use “dividends”. This is the payout for 1 unit of bet. Each type of bet has a denomination for the unit. For Win and Place bets, this is $5. So you can bet 5, 10, 15, etc. and would collect the amount listed per $5. So the favorite in this race would pay 11 on your 5 bet if he won.


Mark had been to the races before but didn’t realize there was any science to it, he thought you just picked one like the lottery and hoped to win. I showed him the horse’s previous races, some sort of track “score” in the program and how to tell the favorite by the lowest dividend. We started betting for real on race 4 and Mark won about $15 so he was happy he learned to handicap. He thought it was pretty easy to pick a winner once you understand the system. Unfortunately it was his last collection for the next 8 races of the day!

The TotePik system isn’t setup for this type of wagering so took some interpretation to use the same approach. Eventually I came out only about $20 under what I went in with over 9 races. Not bad for a day’s worth of entertainment.

And for those of you who have been to the races with me, No the 7th horse in the 7th race did NOT win and I lost my $5. I probably should have bet the 8th horse in the 8th race since 8 is the lucky number in Asia!

I saw B Dean listed as the trainer in a later race so figured I should try again. Then the announcer said something about a “Brian Dean trained horse” and Mark and I perked up. Seriously. I looked it up when we got home:

I have aged better than Brian Dean. And may be a better horse trainer as his horses didn’t win again either.