Betting can be a matter of fine margins, as my fingernails will attest to! You can see this of course with casinos, where the ‘house edge’ isn’t all that significant, but due to how a person gambles (and how much they gamble on each bet) it can directly feed into their success or otherwise. At the roulette wheel, which is fixed odds and has a very small house edge, if you spend your time placing a small percentage of your bank on each event, you’re more likely to leave a happy man than if you randomly lump on a high percentage your banking bank – then inevitably hit a bad run. So strategy matters, and along with that any ‘edge’ you can gain. Funnily enough, one of the ‘edges’ I discovered at my local casino is a tie in with the Great Yarmouth racecourse. Essentially it’s a perk / bonus, in that if you pay to go into the racecourse you get a free £5 bet and drink at the casino.

This perk is not dissimilar to betting bonuses available with UK bookmakers. These take on a few forms, of which a common type of betting bonus, or ‘welcome offer’, goes along these lines: Place a £20 bet and get another £20 bet for free. So essentially a ‘like for like’, where your commitment to place a bet of a certain value sees you rewarded with a bet of the same amount, up to say £20 or £30 on some occasions. Other forms of free bets or bonuses include an outright free bet where you make no commitment to spend your own money initially. This can be one bet, or split across multiple smaller free bet opportunities. Some welcome bonuses are a half way house of, say bet £10 and get £30 free, so once you’ve ‘put your money where your mouth is’ you see a good reward for doing so. You can find the best horse racing offers at horseracingbetting.co.uk . It can be both valuable and useful to compare and contrast welcome offers.

Another plus of signing up for a welcome bonus or promotion is that often these perks are ongoing. I was with one bookmaker that would call from time to time with a free bet offer. It wasn’t even advertised anywhere, it appeared to be specific to my betting account. These perks are not uncommon with bookmakers, and competition between them has really ramped up over the years. ‘Best Odds‘ guarantees are commonplace now, so there’s less worry about not getting the biggest betting price possible. There are ‘odds boost’ type offers too, where you receive better odds than you typically would on certain events (typically horse racing and football). Again this can be a huge plus where we’re talking about finding ‘value’ in your bets,  and boosting your winnings. That can make make a serious monetary difference considering what can be won as a horse racing punter, especially on accumulator bets. Best odds and odds boost type features are definitely a useful tool to utilise in scenarios like that.

With horse racing, it you analyse the form closely or have an innate awareness of ‘value’, you’re one step ahead of the competition as it is (and this is something that those into ‘fixed odds’ betting events can’t really take advantage of).  So when adding  these bonuses and boosts into the equation , it really can make a difference. All in all, this isn’t something that those who enjoy a bet should allow themselves to overlook!

 

This could have been nasty at Navan!! Just guessing obviously, but looks like a jockey out jogging the track and I can only assume he had headphones in and didn’t hear the horses coming?! ?? pic.twitter.com/OR9mO2G1lW

— Kevin Blake (@kevinblake2011) November 11, 2018

Jockey Evan Daly, yesterday gave himself and At The Races viewers a fright, when his jog around the course happened to coincide with horses leaping over one of the fences. He hadn’t realised that the Grade 3 For Auction Novice Hurdle was underway.

The teenager soon reacted, at the Navan, Republic of Ireland track once he realised the gravity of the situation and so was thankfully unharmed. It was certainly a near miss he could’ve done without though!

Exactly the type of stuff we want to see at the track

 

There was a time when the idea of sitting at home and watching a horse race on your mobile phone seemed like a far-fetched notion. And that wasn’t all that long ago. But in all fairness, seeing the way tech was heading, we could see that happening. Now, you know we like to have a little fun here at Wackyraces so today we thought we’d explore the weirdest and wackiest (of course) racing innovations we’d like to see. They’ll probably never happen, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want them all the same.

 

A moving grandstand

Yes, you read that right, a grandstand that moves. Picture this; you’re at the races, betting slip in hand, ready for the off. The bell rings and the horses are out. They barrel past the grandstand (which is right by the starting gate), and as they pass, the stand itself starts to move to keep up with the horses. The entire crowd is whisked around on a monorail-like track watching every step and hearing every crack of the whip. How great would that be? The only downside we can see is motion sickness. But that’s not really a drawback if we’re entirely honest.

The robot jockey

Now if you’re a driver, there’s a 97.8% chance that a robot will take over your job in the not too distant future. That said, we find it hard to believe that a robot would ever replace our current jockeys and that’s why we want to see it so badly. Imagine the Grand National or the Kentucky Derby being won by an android jostled about on the back of a descendant of Secretariat or Desert Orchid. The after-race interview would be one of the strangest scenarios you can imagine with both horse and jockey unable to articulate how it felt to cross the finish line. It would be like something from a cheesy futuristic 80s movie. Magic.

A swimming furlong

Now, this would only work if the robot jockeys were entirely waterproof which they really should be anyway. A swimming furlong would be in the middle of the race and would involve the horse swimming through a not-too-deep pool with a jockey on the back before emerging at the other end to finish the race. If our experience watching old westerns has told us anything, it’s that horses can swim through strong currents with cowboys, or in this case, jockeys on their back. How great would it be to see the outsiders having a chance because they happen to be stronger swimmers than the favorites! Besides, according to the experts, horses love it.

A horseless furlong

Yes, we know, how can you have a horse race without a horse? But we’d love to see a race where the jockeys have to compete against each other in either the first or final furlong. Jockeys are great athletes, and we salute their skills at horsemanship, but to us, it seems like a great idea to see just how athletic they really are.

Reclining chairs at the track

Massages at the track? We’re in!

Okay so maybe this one isn’t quite as wacky or out there as our other suggestions, but we just can’t stop thinking about how amazing it would be to have reclining armchairs all over the race track. Nice, big, comfy leather ones with cup holders and massage functions. And while we’re at it, perhaps an attached cooler too? We’re not asking for too much, because the technology is already here. We just have to figure out a way to convince track owners to install 20,000 recliners and let us all use them for free. It would be like going to one of those movie theaters with VIP reclining seats except you wouldn’t be at another movie with that guy Ryan Reynolds in it – you’d be at the races. It really can’t get much better than that.

So what’s your favorite or do you have any better ideas of your own? Android horses to go along with the robot jockey or something even wackier? Whatever it is, there’s one thing we’re sure of; we’ll never see any of our wacky innovations in this lifetime, and that’s a pity.

We all like a drink from time to time. It’s nice to unwind after a hard day’s work perhaps, or to let your hair down at the weekend. Maybe you like to knock back a couple and then brave it on the dancefloor, or fail miserably in a pub quizz. One hopped up individual though, namely Michael Wells-Rody, from Kentucky, decided while in his merry mindset that he’d like to take part in the Kentucky Breeder’s Cup (Did the $6 million Breeder’s Cup Classic take his fancy?).

An inebriated Wells-Rody, made his way into the restricted area of the course and grabbed the first horse to hand. He then made it out of the tunnel and was well on his way to the track entrance when he was stopped by a sober on course steward (aka a spoil sport). He was taken to a county jail near to track ponder his hijinks.

Instead of partaking in alcohol fueled escapades, he should’ve instead just stayed and watched the high class racing action at the Churchill Downs track in Louisville, Kentucky, which saw Enabled ridden by Frankie Detorri win the Breeder’s Cup Turf Race on Enable.

The 24 year old individual was described as being “loud and disorderly” on the scene, with the citation stating that he “was manifestly under the influence of alcoholic beverages”. He has since been charged with disorderly conduct and alcohol intoxication in a public place. He’s set to appear in court.