Breaking into horse betting is not something that is prohibited. Actually, it refers to the rounding down of the odds on the board of all the racetracks in this country. In a pool of pari-mutuel bets, the break can affect the amount of payout you receive once you cash out your winning bets in the window.
In the United States, a dime is used. This means that the probabilities are rounded to the nearest tenth. For example, if the fair odds for a particular horse sit at 5.73/1, they will be rounded up to 5.7/1 before calculating the payouts. Following the usual calculation, breaking ten cents would generally round the payouts to the nearest multiple of 20 cents. So instead of receiving a payout of $15.33, you’ll receive just $15.20 when you redeem your winning ticket.
How does the break affect your bets?
Depending on the type of bet you place, the break may have no effect or take a big dent in your winnings. You won’t know in advance how much a break will cost you, since in a pool of pari-mutuel, the amount cannot be determined until the windows are closed. However, a safe assumption would be that your payout can be reduced by as much as 19 cents and around 10 cents on average, depending on the odds.
When you think about it, 10 cents isn’t much when you expect a payment of, say, $12. However, when it comes to winning minimum bets like $2.40, a breakout of even 5 cents can be very steep.
One interesting thing to note about breaking is that it’s best to play a knight with odds of 1/9. This is because for winning bets the minimum payout is $2.40 and even if the payout is assumed to be lower for 1/9 odds the track is required to give the minimum payout, so no need to worry about breakage here.
How do you prevent your bets from being affected by breaking?
There’s really no way you can avoid it. You can simply choose to bet on situations where breaking will not figure heavily, for example on remote bets or exotic bets like trifectas. Breakage is a problem in favorites and in groupings of venues and shows. But this approach would severely limit your bets. It’s much better to just see rest as part of the whole process and that while it might cost you a lot on certain days, it won’t matter much on others either. Eventually, it will just level out.
Breaking shouldn’t take the fun out of gambling.