Today I thought I’d talk about backing the field and how we can use dutching to our advantage. For those that don’t know what dutching is, it’s where we back more than one horse in a race. It can be applied in any form of betting but of course today we’ll focus it on the horses. You go through the card and in a competitive race you can’t split your opinion between who will win between three horses. What do you do? Leave the race, pick one at random or go for the one with the shortest price? Personally I dutch them and dutching makes up a big part of my portfolio.
One of the quickest ways of working out how to dutch is to use a calculator of which there are many on the internet. As always though it is important to understand exactly what we are doing in terms of how the bet is constructed. Usually, depending on the odds we end up betting to an odds-on scenario so we need to make sure that long-term we are hitting a high enough strike rate for this to remain profitable. Let me explain.
We’ve found three horses that we fancy and they are all at 4/1. To back those 3 horses as a dutch bet we are now betting to 4/6. A big difference to just 4/1! So how do we work this out?
You have to calculate the percentage of the odds. I have shown this calculation a hundred times but here it is again! We divide the left number by the right number and add 1. So 4 divided by 1 plus 1 equals 5. We divide 5 into 100 to give us 20%. We can do this with any odds so 3/1 would equal 25% etc.
Once we have found our percentages we need to add them all together and that will be the new odds at which we bet. So three 4/1 shots added together will become 60%. Divide the 60% into 100 and you get 1.66 or 4/6. If you were to now place £20 each on these 4/1 shots you would return £100 but of course, your total stake would be £60 so a £40 profit would be yours.
It can look an attractive way to bet at first as you’re increasing your chance of a return but remember that you need a much higher strike rate as you are betting to shorter odds. Have a play around with it and see if you can get to grips with it.
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