Playing To Win

TYPICAL SUPERFECTA STRATEGIES

A strategic bet with a chance at huge payoffs

The Superfecta wager offers you three ways to play the bet: boxes, wheels and part-wheels. If you bet box, such as a $0.10 exacta box with four horses, you have many chances for only $2.40! And best of all, the $0.10 Superfecta can pay $100 or more, so you are giving yourself a chance to win big. If you include some long shots in your wager, which should be a part of any Superfecta wager, you could be in line for even greater payoffs.

I don't know who will win

If you don't have any good feelings on who will win, the cost of a Superfecta bet can add up quickly, particularly when you box more than four horses.

I like more than one horse for the win

Again, if you think more than one horse can win a race, you can be looking at a pretty expensive bet. Boxing a large number of horses in the Superfecta is not the wisest way to go (see the bet cost chart on the next page for more info). If you want to box more than four horses, try to eliminate some others in the race that you think have no chance of finishing in the top four spots to reduce your cost.

Another way to play multiple horses is to place just those you think have the best chance of running well in the top two or three spots. That way, you can wheel your top selections and still select more horses in the third and fourth spots for a similar cost.

Win more for less

With the introduction of the $0.10 Superfecta at many tracks around the country, the bet has become much more attractive to the casual racegoer. A 10-cent superfecta box with four horses costs only $2.40. A five-horse box costs a total of $12, a six-horse box $36: all of these figures are one-tenth the cost of the original $1 minimum bet.

Advanced Strategies

I know who will definitely hit the board

If you feel strongly about a horse getting in the Superfecta mix, you might want to key it in more than one spot. To reduce the cost of any exotic bet, finding a key horse and "singling" it in one position makes the bet much more playable. See the "Types of Superfecta Bets" page for the cost of keying or wheeling a single horse.

The favorite is low-priced

A great angle for Superfecta players is finding a "sure thing" type of favorite and keying it in the top spot. This gives you the chance to spread your money on more horses in the next three spots, including plenty of longshots that produce the big payoffs. The flipside to this is when you don't like the favorite at all for the win, but think it most likely hit the board, as we mentioned in the paragraph above. Generally, the further back in the race the favorite finishes, the higher the payoff will be.

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Superfecta Topics

• Superfectas Intro
• Typical Strategies
• Types of Bets