Being a punter

Betting is the only role that calls for neither a horse, nor a contract, nor patience. You stake on the finish of a race you do not control, and you collect if you saw it right.

It is also the one where sulkies go fastest, and this page says why.

Betting without real money

Let us say it before anything else, because it is essential: you bet here in sulkies, the game's currency, and never in real money. A winning bet brings in sulkies, which are of use only inside Sulkyland — entering a horse, buying one, paying for a mating. They are not converted into money and they do not leave the game.

There is therefore nothing at risk for your wallet. An unlucky bet costs sulkies, that is to say a little of your progress in the game, and nothing else. Sulkyland is not a gambling site: it is a breeding and racing simulation, in which betting is one of the possible roles, on the same footing as trainer, breeder or racecourse manager.

That difference is not a formality, and several players came here precisely for it: to keep the pleasure of betting — reading a field, choosing, waiting for the finish — while stepping away from betting on real races. The exercise is the same, the attention and the reasoning too; only the financial stake has gone. If that is your case, you are in the right place, and you will find no encouragement to gamble money anywhere in it.

How the sulkies staked are shared out

90% of the stakes are redistributed to the winners. The remaining 10% goes to nobody.

That is not an anomaly, it is the principle of pari-mutuel betting: you are not playing against the game, you are playing against the other punters, and the game takes its share on the way. Over time, punters as a whole therefore lose 10% of what they stake. Bet with what you accept losing, and treat the rest as entertainment — not as an income.

You can only bet for a quarter of an hour

And this is the point nobody guesses: you cannot bet on a race whose entries are still open. The betting window opens at the close of entries and shuts at the start — which, for an ordinary race, is the fifteen minutes of preparation. Competitions can offer more, up to six hours.

Before that, the game answers You cannot bet on this race yet; after, You can no longer bet on this race.

One exception, and it is the most useful one: the Prix du webmaster races, the ones the game creates itself, start one hour after their entries close. They therefore offer a full hour to bet, instead of a quarter of an hour. As they cover every usual category at all times, there is always something to bet on: they are the punter's bread and butter, and the best place to learn without racing against the clock.

That constraint is good news in disguise: at the moment you bet, everything is known. The entrants are final, the numbers allotted, the handicaps calculated, the turf displayed. You are not betting on intentions, you are betting on a race that is entirely described. The Upcoming races screen therefore lists only the races you can stake on right now.

The seven types of bet

Each one calls for a number of horses, and is only offered from a certain number of entrants onwards:

Type	You have to find	From
Win	the winner	2 entrants
Double win	the first 2	4 entrants
Place	a horse among the first 3	6 entrants
Double place	2 horses among the first 3	6 entrants
Trio	the first 3	6 entrants
Quarto	the first 4	8 entrants
Quinto	the first 5	10 entrants

The finishing order never counts. That is the good news in this table, and it is worth reading twice: no type of bet asks you to rank the horses. Finding “the first five” of the quinto means finding the five horses that will be in front — it does not matter which one wins. You are designating a group, not an order, and that is exactly why you tick boxes.

The vocabulary says so, in fact, for anyone who knows real racing: in French pari-mutuel betting, the tiercé asks for the first three in order, whereas the trio asks for the same three horses in any order. Sulkyland took up that -o ending to name its bets — trio, quarto, quinto — and that is precisely what it signals. There is no tiercé here, and it is not an oversight.

What separates a win bet from a place bet is therefore not the order but the depth. The double win asks for the first two; the double place, two horses among the first three — it leaves one place of margin, it is easier, it pays less.

The harder it is, the more it pays — mechanically, since fewer people manage it. The place bet is for the cautious, the quinto for the optimists.

How a dividend is calculated

The dividend is what a stake of 1 brings in. For a given type: you take 90% of everything staked on that type, you add the share of the jackpot that falls to it, and you divide by the total of the winning stakes.

Three very concrete consequences:

• A favourite pays little. If everybody has played the same horse, the cake is shared among them all. Being right is not enough: you have to be right and alone.
• The dividend is only known after the race. There are no odds displayed in advance, because they depend on what the others will have staked.
• A dividend below 1 is never paid. Rather than give you back less than your stake, the game refunds everybody on that type of bet. So you cannot lose money by winning.

What nobody finds benefits the others

Here is the most interesting mechanism in betting, and it rewards the cautious.

The types are settled from the hardest to the easiest: quinto, quarto, trio, double win, double place, win, place. And if nobody has found a type, the 90% of its stakes are not lost: they come down to the following types and swell their dividends.

In other words, the stakes of the players who tried the quinto without finding it end up with those who played the place. On a race that is hard to read, small bets can therefore pay far more than usual — and that is why the place bet should not be neglected.

The jackpot

Some races carry a punter's jackpot: a sum added by the organiser, on top of the stakes. It is shared out between the types of bet, the largest share going to the hardest ones.

A jackpot changes the whole calculation: it makes a race profitable even if few people stake on it, since the money does not come from the punters alone. The columns of the betting screens display it, and it is the first figure to look at when choosing which race to play.

The settlement, and the suspense

Dividends are calculated shortly after the finish, and winnings paid automatically. You have nothing to claim.

One detail that comes as a surprise and is deliberate: the My last bets screen shows your bets, their type, their combination and their stake, but not their winnings. It is made that way so that you can watch the race without knowing in advance whether you have won. The dividends are read on Last races when you are ready.

Choosing a race, then horses

Two pieces of method, since chance is not the only thing at play.

Choose the race first. Many entrants open up the hard bets and dilute the favourites; a jackpot raises the dividends; a small total of stakes means little competition. Those three figures are in the columns of Upcoming races.

Then read the field. The list of entrants gives each one's earnings, score, age and handicap: see Start. And do not forget what you know about races — a horse that has never run carries the maximum handicap, number 1 starts on the rail, heavy turf does not suit everybody. All of that is in The races, and it is what separates a punter from a lottery player.

For the staking formulas — combined, range, multi — see Betting.