Monday Morning Message with Jason Beem Oct. 19, 2026

Jason discusses the trend of favorites winning at a higher rate each and every year as that number has now gone over 40%. Should racing try to do something about that? 

A good Monday morning to you all! It’s the final week up here in the Pacific Northwest for me 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 as though it was one favorite after another scoring on the card. In total, seven of the nine races Saturday were won by the favored runner. It got me thinking about whether or not horse racing has any kind of central “competition committee” like most other sports do? 

These are groups within their respective sports that recommend and discuss rule changes in order 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 help lead to 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 is smaller, 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 and are tougher to beat and logical to bet. 

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. 

I suppose 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 kind of 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 get races to be more competitive for the 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, as the public is indeed quite smart. I think it just 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!