Thursday Thoughts with Jason Beem Oct. 1, 2026

A good Thursday morning to you all! Good to be back on the Thursday Thoughts beat after a couple weeks of vacation. I like this column because I can talk about whatever I want and today I wanted to talk about something that came up when I was talking to a friend at the track last weekend. And the question I’m posing seemingly has the same answer for everyone, however I do think there are some subtleties to it. 

The question is, what is your goal with betting the races? And the answer for a wildly large majority is probably “to make money.” Simple enough, end of column right? Well let me start with what my buddy said the other day. He’s an older guy on a fixed retirement income and he is a spot player, meaning he doesn’t bet just one card, rather looks for his angles and opportunities he likes and will bet to win or maybe exactas in those spots. What he told me is that of course he wants to win, but for him his main goal is to be right on his opinions but also to stretch his money and allow himself to play most days during the week. For years he was out at the track and off-track betting five days a week. Now I think he goes three or four, but his real goal is to be able to win regularly enough to afford himself the ability to come out and enjoy his social time with his friends at the off-track betting site multiple days per week. Obviously winning makes that goal achievable. 

I do think some people would answer the question with “to have fun” or “the mental challenge of handicapping and betting” but I do think most people would answer “to make money” or some variation of that. Back when poker boomed in the early 2000s, I remember being in meetings at various tracks hearing management talk about “how do we do what poker did?” Poker managed to grow and vault into mainstream audiences for a while and every casino added a poker room to their facilities. It was even on NBC and ESPN all the time. There are a lot of theories as to why poker exploded. The big personalities, the huge amounts of money at stakes, the game theory, and the exposed hole card technology, which at the beginning wasn’t technology, it was just tape delayed and edited in after they knew what the players had. While all those reasons certainly contributed to it, I really do think the poker boom was in large part because people saw a skill game that you could actually learn about and play and win money. They saw people winning money all the time on national tv. Of course, we don’t know how many of those players were long term winning players, but many were. 

There’s a myriad of ways to try and help more players win money and we’ve exhaustively talked about that on the show and online. Lower takeout, more competitive fields and field sizes, better bet options, and on and on. Players winning would solve a lot of racing’s issues because the more people who win, the more people who will start participating in the game and handle goes up and on and on and on. I know it’s not just as simple as that, but it would be a good start. One of the coolest things about doing the podcast over the years has been to talk with winning horseplayers and learn from the hard work they’ve put in as well as their acumen at the betting windows. To them, “to make money” is the answer to the original question. Making money is the score keeper when it comes to the betting side of this game. 

Hope everyone has a fun weekend as we’re loaded with Breeders’ Cup preps over the next couple of weeks, and hope you can make some money!