How to play
Six greyhounds line up in the traps, each in a traditional racing jacket: 1 red, 2 blue, 3 white, 4 black, 5 orange and 6 black-and-white stripes. Every race comes with a fresh race card, so the favourite of one race can be the outsider of the next.
The race card is a small table. Each row is one dog: its trap number, its name (Rocket Red, Blue Flash, White Lightning, Black Pepper, Orange Zest, Stripe Dash), a row of Form dots and two odds boxes, Win and Top 2.
- Choose a chip from the tray: 10, 50, 100 or 500 credits.
- Tap an odds box to put that chip on it. Tap again to add another chip. You can back several dogs, and you can mix Win and Top 2 bets in the same race.
- Press Race! The dogs run, the finishing order appears, and every winning bet is paid at the odds printed on the card.
Clear takes all chips off the card before the start. After a race, Rebet puts the same bets back on the next card with one tap (the odds will be different, because the card is new). A single bet can be 10 to 1,000 credits, and the whole race is capped at 5,000.
Reading the odds
The odds are decimal. They tell you what comes back for each credit staked, including the stake itself. Put 20 on a dog at 4.50 and you collect 90 if it wins: your 20 plus 70 profit. A Win bet pays only if your dog finishes first. A Top 2 bet pays if it finishes first or second, so its odds are always shorter.
How the race is decided
Before each race the game gives every dog a hidden strength. The finishing order is then drawn from those strengths: the first dog across the line is picked at random in proportion to strength, then the second from the dogs that are left, and so on. A strong dog wins more often, but any dog can win any race.
The Form dots are a picture of those chances. The favourite always shows five dots, and every other dog gets dots in proportion to its chance of winning compared with the favourite. Two dots does not mean “a bad dog”; it means somewhere between 30% and 50% as likely to win as the top-rated runner on this card.
Odds come straight from the same chances. For each dog and each bet type, the game works out the exact probability, divides 0.95 by it and rounds down to the nearest 0.05. The shortest price on offer is 1.05. In plain terms, a bet gives back about 95 credits for every 100 staked over many races, and slightly less where the rounding bites. When a dog is a very heavy favourite, its Top 2 chance (very rarely even its Win chance) can be so high that the formula would give less than 1.05: that bet is closed for the race, and its button shows a dash.
The result is drawn the moment you press Race!. The animation only shows what was drawn.
Strategy
Every price has the house margin built in, so the card can’t be beaten over time. What you can choose is how the session feels.
- Favourites win often but pay little. With six runners, the top-rated dog wins about one race in three on a typical card. A 1.60 price looks dull, but it lands far more often than a 9.00 shot.
- Rounding costs more at short odds. Cutting 1.37 down to 1.35 trims your return by about 1.5%; cutting 20.04 to 20.00 barely matters. If you like the favourite, a Top 2 bet on it often has the same problem, so check the price before you commit.
- Top 2 smooths the swings. Two places are paid, so a dog with three or four dots still gets home in the first two fairly often.
- Spreading chips does not create value. Backing three dogs to win just pays three margins at once. It does make a losing race less likely, at the cost of smaller profits when you hit.
- Size bets so you see plenty of races. With 1,000 starting credits, 20 to 50 per race gives you a long session; 500 per race is over quickly either way.
If you prefer more runners and a Top 3 bet, the Horse Race table uses the same system with eight horses. For a four-way contest settled by cards instead of strengths, try Thirty-Two Cards.
