A betting strategy or betting system is a structured approach to gambling, intended to counter the inherent bias held by the house in casino and card games, and by bookmakers in horseracing and sports betting.
Horse racing betting systems are based on a number of criteria, some of which include analysis of the horses' form.
- Often horse racing systems are based on financial systems such as hedging (betting on multiple outcomes in a race) and arbitrage (lay the horse a low price and back it at a high price).
- Other horse racing systems exist which are based on items such as horse name, jockey form, trainer form, and lane draw.
- Modern horse racing systems can rely on specific betting possibilities only offered on betting exchanges.
- Loss recovery systems such as Martingale can also be applied to horse racing.
The following betting strategies apply to games which operate on independent events. For such games, the odds of a particular outcome are identical for every bet played. No such strategy can beat the house edge (if any) in the long run, and all of them trade off many small wins for a big loss or vice versa.
- Martingale - doubling bet after each loss until a win is achieved (or fails when the amount of the bet becomes excessive)
- Kelly criterion
- Split martingale
- Anti-martingale
- d'Alembert
- Contra d'Alembert
- Regression
- Paroli of Three
- Sleeping Cheval
