Why I love the Preakness

Playing the ponies is a mug's game. But the unglamorous Preakness is the best betting race in the Triple Crown. Here's how a nit like me plans to make a killing.

Editor's note: This story has been updated since it was first published.

By Ted McClelland

Read more: Gambling, Life

Photo: AP/Wide World

Photo composite of Preakness favorite Street Sense at Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore, on May 18.

May 19, 2007 | It's not quite true, as Damon Runyon once wrote, that all horseplayers die broke. We live that way, too.

Consider my friend the Plumber. The Plumber got his nickname because, like a lot of gamblers, he'll bet $200 on a horse, but he won't spend $20 on a pair of pants. He's a 50-ish suburban Jewish man, but his jeans sag like a gangbanger's, his kinky russet hair looks as though it was styled by Beethoven's barber, and he once spent an entire race meet wearing glasses with one stem. When he's low on betting money, the Plumber drives a cab. But he's a happy man, because he's spent his life at the racetrack. "Sure I don't have a lot of money," he says. "But compared to most people around the world, I live like a lord. I've got a roof over my head, I've got heat, I've got indoor plumbing. I always get enough to eat. What more do I need?"

The Preakness is this Saturday, and some of you are planning one of your few-times-a-year trips to the track or the OTB. Here's a word of warning to those expecting to win: Betting on horses is the most unforgiving form of gambling around. The house take is 20 percent, which means that for every dollar the average horseplayer wagers, he gets back three quarters and a nickel. Slot machines, poker, craps, roulette, Pittsburgh 6 1/2 over Seattle -- they all offer a better edge than the ponies. Only around 2 percent of horseplayers turn a profit each year. But since the game is parimutuel -- the gamblers set the odds, and compete against each other, rather than the house -- around 100 percent of horseplayers think they can win.

The Plumber has been refining his system for over 30 years now, and believes he's close to discovering the Rosetta Stone of the racetrack."I'm dividing all my horses into blue horses and red horses," he told me the last time I ran into him, out at Arlington Park, near Chicago. "Blue horses are the best horses, so I'm further dividing them into blue horses with rectangles and blue horses with circles."

I haven't seen the Plumber in awhile, so I can't tell you how his system is working. But I can tell you about some other guys who thought they had an angle. There was Matt, who had to wake his wife at 5 o'clock one morning to confess that he'd charged $170,000 in horse bets on the company credit card. Or Warren, whose losses became so dire that he sought counseling from a professional gambler. The old sharpie taught him to handicap, but Warren, who liked to say, "When I was younger, I wanted to marry every woman I went out with," never learned the patience to wait for a good bet. Finally, there was Snow, a cocaine addict who kicked his habit and became a gambling addict. He funded his new jones by "stooping," combing the track for winning tickets thrown away by mistake.

One year, I tried to beat the races myself. I went to the track every day. For months, I lost and lost, until finally, in July, I decided to devote every fiber of my being to gambling. Each night, I handicapped until bedtime. Each afternoon, I sequestered myself in a remote section of the Arlington Park grandstand, where I could contemplate the odds board without distraction. My discipline paid off. In seven weeks, I won $150.

More often, though, it felt like a mug's game. There was the day I bet a horse at 18-1, and watched him take a huge lead into the stretch. I cheered wildly at my good fortune. A 350-pound gambler at the next table was bellowing like a bull in the breeding shed. Then our long shot pulled up lame, pitching his jockey over the saddle. I didn't make a profit that year, but I did get a book out of the experience. "Horseplayers: Life at the Track" is an account of my attempt to turn pro, and all the colorful characters I met along the way.

My latest misadventure in gambling occurred at this month's Kentucky Derby. I loved Street Sense, but he was the favorite. Only chumps bet the favorite to win. There's no money in it. So I put Street Sense on top of a trifecta, a bet forecasting the top three finishers. Street Sense won, but the second- and third-place horses were an unwelcome surprise.

"You guys at the track think you're so clever," a friend mocked me. "You always outsmart yourselves."

So I lost $100. I'm going to get it back this Saturday. On the Preakness. There are plenty of reasons to scorn the Preakness. It's held at Pimlico Race Course, which is surrounded by the run-down brick flats of northwest Baltimore. Pimlico is, without a doubt, the ugliest venue to host a major American sporting event. (I am including roller derby finals and bull-riding championships in that calculation.) Its most notable feature, the mound of earth that gave it the nickname Old Hilltop, was flattened decades ago. Its wooden grandstand seats look as though they were imported from a leaky-roofed minor league baseball stadium, the kind with tobacco ads on the outfield wall. The legendary match race between War Admiral and Seabiscuit was run at Pimlico, but the producers of "Seabiscuit" re-created the contest at Keeneland, in Kentucky. Pimlico was both too modern and too dilapidated for the big-budget Hollywood movie.

The least glamorous Triple Crown race, the Preakness neither introduces contenders to the world, like the Kentucky Derby, nor confirms their greatness, like the Belmont. Even the Preakness' symbols are inferior to those of its peers. The Derby has the mint julep. At the Preakness, you can drink a Black-Eyed Susan, which the Baltimore Sun once described as "a mix of three fruit juices, equal parts vodka, rum, and peach schnapps, and a dollop of something that could only be antifreeze." The race's theme song, "Maryland, My Maryland," performed each year by Naval Academy midshipmen in spotless whites, is a Civil War anthem extolling the martyrs of a secessionist riot. If there were a Bulwer-Lytton prize for bad 19th century American prosody, these lines, sung to the tune of "O Tannenbaum," would win: "Avenge the patriotic gore/ That flecked the streets of Baltimore." Not exactly "My Old Kentucky Home," or "New York, New York," which is belted out before the Belmont these days.

Next page: The secret to winning money on the Preakness