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Tote Placepot Strategy

The Placepot can be a fun bet that gives a lot of fun for a small investment and when done correctly can be profitable in the long term.

With the Placepot you need to pick a horse to be placed in the first six races at any English or Irish race meeting. To maximise your chances of winning you can perm multiple selections in each race so that you have multiple horses running for you in each leg of the Placepot .

If you choose two horses in each race you would have a total of 64 combination lines which you could place for as little as £6.40 at 10p per line.

You may have races where you may feel you need more than two horses in a race, you might even choose four or five and in some races, you might just want to rely on one selection if it looks solid. To calculate the number of permutations you just need to multiply the number of horses in each of the races so if you had two in each race you would have 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 = 64.

Making Your Selections

If there are lots of placed favourites in a Placepot then it generally won’t pay much but you still want to include them in your Placepot perm as they are most likely to place. It would not make any sense to back an outsider to place when it will rarely place and even if it did you only end up with the same dividend as the person that will have had bet on the favourite or any other fancied horse that placed.

So you should include all fancied horses in your Placepot and don’t go looking for any outsiders as you will just be wasting money in the long run.

By covering the fancied horses you have more chances of getting them placed and you can end up with multiple selections placed in each race that increases your winnings. If the favourite doesn’t get placed but at least one of your other fancied selections does then then a large number of people will be knocked out of the Placepot and the dividend will go up considerably than when a favourite is placed.

Place Your Bet as Late As Possible

By placing you Placepot bet late on you can take account of any non-runners that are declared before the first race when you will place your bet. When any non-runner is declared all the money from that selection is automatically placed on the favourite. If you have already placed your bet and you had two selections and you also had the favourite your stake from the non-runner would be transferred over to the favourite so all you money would be riding on the favourite. If the favourite doesn’t place you will be out of the Placepot and even if it does it will be carrying a huge amount of the money in the Placepot pool so the dividend will be poor.

On the flip side, if the favourite doesn’t place then a large number tickets are taken out of the pool and this can see huge dividends returned at the end of the day when a card is decimated by non-runners. This usually occurs when there are dramatic changes in the going, a heavy downpour of rain can change the race conditions and horses will be pulled out of their respective races by connections if they feel it is against them.

In April 2002 at Newcastle the Placepot dividend paid £22,121.50. As the weather turned and a heavy downpour of rain changed the going large amounts of horses were withdrawn. A few favourites failed to get placed but surprisingly the largest priced placed horse was just 7/1! Huge amounts of money were transferred on to the favourites and a couple did not place resulting in the massive dividend.

By placing your Placepot bet late you can make sure there is less chance of having your money transferred to the favourite and you can cover other selections. If several of the favourites do not get placed then then the dividends are likely to be quite handsome and this is what you will be hoping for.

Another benefit of placing your bet as late as possible is that you can follow the money; you can purely make your selections based on their market support if you don’t want to spend time studying form.

4 Feb 2015

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