If you are into horse racing, you have probably searched the Internet for websites that offer free picks. Most free pick web sites that sell tip sheets only show you the most likely winner. If you want more, they offer exotics and multi race picks for a price. I often wondered how accurate their free picks are and if I should even bother looking at them. So, I decided to track the results of two popular free pick web sites to see if one was better than the other.
The two web sites I used are Guaranteed Tip Sheets and Racing Dudes. I used Canterbury Park for the track and recorded results for 7 race cards which was a total of 61 races. Picking the winner of every race on a card is very difficult, especially if you are only picking one horse in each race. GTips had the winner 27.9% of the time and RDudes had the winner 39.3% of the time over 61 races. They picked the same horse to win in 48% of the races. When picking the same horse, they were correct 12 times or 19.7%. If you used both of their picks, you would have had the winner 29 times or 47.5%.
If you used their picks for each race, you would have missed the early and late pick 4 every time. Their picks might be helpful if you can pick the winner on the other 32 races. But are they just picking the favorite every time? If you placed a $2 win bet on each race, RDudes would have returned $105 for a $17 loss. Betting GTips picks would have returned $73 for a $49 loss. The data shows that Racing Dudes provided more accurate free picks. Many track web sites provide expert picks that list the top 3 or 4 horses in each race. With 3 picks in each race, experts had the winner 75% of the time. In my next post I’ll take a look at Equibase’s Smart Picks. A free tool that uses Equibase data to help you create your own automatically generated selections.