Monday Morning Message with Jason Beem Oct. 19, 2026

Jason discusses the trend of favorites winning at an increasing rate each year, and that number has now exceeded 40%. Should racing try to do something about that? 

A good Monday morning to you all! It’s my final week up here in the Pacific Northwest before heading to Kentucky for the Breeders’ Cup, and then back to Florida as we’re within a month of Tampa Bay Downs getting underway this winter. Very excited for the trip, and obviously super excited to get to see a Breeders’ Cup at Keeneland! 

I was watching the races on Saturday from Santa Anita, and it felt like one favorite after another scoring on the card. In total, favorites won seven of the nine races Saturday. It got me thinking about whether horse racing has any kind of central “competition committee,” as most other sports do. 

These are groups within their respective sports that recommend and discuss rule changes to keep the play at a certain level and to help with parity amongst the various teams. Some examples of changes in sports in recent years include reducing goalie equipment size in hockey to encourage more goals when scoring was down. In baseball, we saw the reduction of moves to first base and bigger bases to make stolen bases come back in vogue again. These are things done to the games to make the sport maintain a level as players and strategies evolve and change. 

In horse racing so far this year, favorites have won 40% of all races run through this past Saturday in the U.S. – another slight uptick from last year’s 39.5% at this same time. In 2015, that number was 37.8%. 

When I first got into racing, the number you always heard was “favorites win a third of the time.” Since then, that number has slowly crept up and up. There are some obvious reasons to explain it: as field size shrinks, there’s more information out there for players, more inside information, and certainly computer-algorithm players have all sharpened the public. Also, many of the top barns just have better strings of horses, are tougher to beat, and are logical bets. 

So should we do something about it? One thing that has gone away in most forms is the handicap race. Better horses were assigned higher weights to make the races as competitive as possible, thus more entertaining and ideal to bet on. In the last year, we’ve seen Equibase rating races start to pop up a little bit, and I’m sure the intention with those is to create more evenly bet and contested races. Whether or not that works, we shall see. 

Part of me just wants to see a committee like this formed just to get some ideas going out to the tracks. To some degree, this should fall on the race offices, and I’d guess it is a point of discussion for many race offices. Having worked in them before, I know they want to make good races more than anyone. Sometimes, as a handicapper, we can get excited when we see the rare 10-horse field, but that race loses a lot of its steam if a very logical favorite is in it. 

I would be very curious to hear people’s thoughts on how to make races more competitive for bettors and to possibly drive that favorite winning percentage back down a few points to the mid-30s. Favorites will always win their fair share; the public is indeed quite smart. I think it gets to a point where when they win so much, it’s hard to get much separation on your tickets and make good scores. Food for thought, at least. 

Have a great week, everyone!