How to Bet on the Preakness: Why a Small Field Changes Everything
The second leg of the Triple Crown is the one where handicapping actually pays, and here is how to bet it without overpaying for the privilege.
By
Eric Pauly
9 min read
How to Bet on the Preakness Stakes
Learning how to bet on the Preakness means learning a race that rewards almost the opposite instincts from the one two weeks earlier. The Kentucky Derby is a 20 horse scramble where the safest assumption going in is chaos. The Preakness Stakes caps the field at 14 and routinely draws somewhere between eight and eleven runners, over a distance a sixteenth of a mile shorter, on a tighter oval, with current form available on most of the horses in the gate.
That combination makes it a genuine handicapping race. Fewer runners means fewer traffic disasters and fewer excuses, and a result you can reason your way toward. It also means shorter prices, so the skill shifts from spreading wide to knowing when a number is worth taking at all. This guide covers the shape of the field, the bets that suit it, the payout math, and where the ticket actually goes.
article Summary
The Preakness Stakes is the second leg of the Triple Crown, run two weeks after the Kentucky Derby at 1 3/16 miles with the field capped at 14 and usually smaller than that. Because you already have Derby form on most of the runners, it is the Triple Crown leg where handicapping earns its keep, but the small field also means shorter prices and much less room for wide exotic tickets. You are betting into parimutuel pools rather than taking a fixed sportsbook price, so nothing locks until the gates open and the takeout comes off the top before anyone gets paid.
Preakness Betting Is Not Kentucky Derby Betting
Same plumbing, very different race
The mechanics carry over. Both races are parimutuel, which means your money goes into a shared pool with every other bettor and your payout depends on where the rest of the money lands rather than on a price a sportsbook posted. If that setup is new to you, our Kentucky Derby betting guide walks through pools, takeout, and how tickets get paid in detail. What changes at the Preakness is not the plumbing. It is the race sitting on top of it.
Fourteen is the cap, and the field is usually smaller
The Derby fills 20 stalls and creates a traffic problem that no amount of handicapping fully solves. The Preakness allows a maximum of 14, and in practice recent editions have gone with high single digits or low double digits. That single fact does more to your ticket than anything else on this page. The favorite is far more reliable than it is in the Derby, longshot prices are shorter, and the exotic pools are smaller because there are fewer combinations to sell.
Two weeks, not five
Derby horses get roughly five weeks to prepare. Preakness runners get 14 days. Some horses come out of a hard Derby trip and are simply not the same animal, and modern trainers know it, which is why it has become normal for connections to skip the second leg entirely and point to the Belmont instead. When the Derby winner passes, the Preakness stops being a coronation and turns into an open race, and that is usually when the prices get interesting.
The oval matters
Pimlico Race Course is a one mile dirt oval with tighter turns than Churchill Downs and a short run into the first bend, which puts a premium on early tactical position. A horse that has to be hustled from an outside post burns energy before the race has really begun. Worth noting: Maryland has been rebuilding Pimlico, so recent runnings have been staged while that work is underway. Confirm the host track and configuration for the year you are betting before you lean on any track bias note, including this one.
The Three Kinds of Horses in a Preakness Field
Every Preakness field sorts into three groups, and knowing which group a horse belongs to tells you more than its last speed figure does.
The Derby winner, when it shows up
A Derby winner running back in two weeks is the shortest price on the board and the reason casual money shows up at all. Sometimes that price is fair. Sometimes you are being asked to lay a number that assumes a hard 1 1/4 mile effort left no mark. The honest question is not whether the horse is best. It usually is. The question is whether even money is enough to cover the possibility that it bounces.
Derby runners looking for a better trip
This is the deepest group and it is where the most reliable value sits. Horses that ran fourth through eighth in the Derby often did so while parked five wide the entire way, or blocked at the quarter pole, or asked to close into a slow pace. Drop them into a nine horse field and the trip problem largely disappears. Exaggerator lost the 2016 Derby to Nyquist and then beat him two weeks later in the Preakness, and that shape of result is not rare.
The fresh shipper
The horse that skipped the Derby entirely and has been training for this specific spot is the group the public consistently underrates, because it has no Derby line to anchor to. Cloud Computing in 2017, Rombauer in 2021, and Early Voting in 2022 all won the Preakness without running in the Derby. When a Derby winner passes on the race, the fresh shipper is very often the horse that beats the tired ones.
Which Preakness Bets Actually Fit a Nine Horse Field
Win bets carry more weight here
In the Derby, spreading is defensible because the race is genuinely unpredictable. In the Preakness, a smaller field means your opinion is more likely to be right, which makes straight win money a better use of the ticket than it is in early May. Place and show pools shrink alongside the field, so a show bet on a short priced horse can return numbers barely worth the effort. Check the will pays before assuming a show bet is the safe option.
Exactas beat superfectas in a small field
Big superfecta scores exist because 20 horse fields produce chaotic finishes and enormous pools. Nine horse fields produce neither. The combinations are fewer, so the payouts are smaller, and the takeout on exotic pools is still the highest on the card. An exacta with a clear opinion on top costs less and hits far more often than a wide superfecta you built to feel covered.
What tickets actually cost
$2 win bet: $2
$1 exacta box with 3 horses: 6 combinations, $6
$1 exacta box with 4 horses: 12 combinations, $12
$0.50 trifecta box with 4 horses: 24 combinations, $12
$0.10 superfecta, one key on top over 4 others: 24 combinations, $2.40
Minimums vary by track and by platform, so confirm the base wager before you build anything with more than two legs.
The undercard is the better card
Preakness Day carries a full stakes program, and the Black Eyed Susan runs the day before. Those races have smaller fields, cleaner pace scenarios, and far less public money distorting the pools. If you genuinely enjoy handicapping rather than just wanting a ticket on the big one, the supporting races are where the reasoning gets paid.
Reading the Preakness Odds Board and Pricing Your Own Number
Fractional odds and what each price has to hit
Racing quotes odds against a $1 stake, so 5 to 1 means you profit $5 for every $1 risked. Convert every price into the hit rate it needs before you decide whether you like it. Our betting odds calculator handles the conversion in one step, but these are the reference points worth memorizing:
Even money needs to win 50 percent of the time
2 to 1 needs about 33 percent
3 to 1 needs 25 percent
5 to 1 needs about 17 percent
8 to 1 needs about 11 percent
12 to 1 needs about 8 percent
In a nine horse race, a horse with a legitimate chance is winning more than 8 percent of the time. That is why double digit prices in a Preakness field are worth a harder look than the same price in a Derby field, where the fifth choice genuinely might be a 5 percent runner.
Takeout is the opponent you never see
Before a dollar gets paid out, the track removes its cut. In Maryland that is roughly 18 percent from the win, place, and show pools and into the low to mid 20s on exotics. A standard sportsbook market priced at -110 on both sides holds a little under 5 percent. Racing is a materially more expensive game, and the smaller pools of a Preakness field do nothing to soften that. Add up the implied probability of every horse on the board and you will land well past 100 percent. The overage is the takeout, sitting in plain view.
Nothing is locked until the gates open
The odds on the screen are estimates recalculated as money flows in, and they keep moving through the post parade. My routine every year is the same: compare the win odds five minutes to post against the morning line and note which horses drifted. The drifters are usually the ones the public quietly forgot about after the Derby. If you carried a futures position on a horse into the Triple Crown, this is also the point where hedging a bet becomes a real decision rather than a theoretical one.
Where to Bet the Preakness, and How It Fits the Rest of Your Saturday
Track, OTB, or an ADW
At the track you bet at a window or a self service terminal. Everyone else uses an advance deposit wagering account, the racing specific apps that feed your money into the same national pools. Online horse wagering is permitted in most states but not all, so confirm your state before funding an account. A handful of states have approved fixed odds horse racing, where a sportsbook offers a locked price instead of a pool position. Where that exists it removes the late drift problem entirely, at the cost of a price that is usually shaded in the book's favor.
Keeping the racing ticket in the same ledger
The third Saturday in May is a full sports day, so for most people the Preakness ticket is one line item sitting next to baseball, playoff basketball, and playoff hockey. When I started logging racing tickets in the same tracker as my sportsbook action, the thing that jumped out was not the win rate. It was how much larger the built in cost was on the racing side once the two sat side by side. Juice Reel syncs bets from connected sportsbook accounts automatically and costs nothing on its free tier, and manual entries cover anything it cannot pull in. Our Juice Reel breakdown covers where it holds up and where the interface still gets in the way.
For the sportsbook half of the day
Neither of these tools handicaps a horse race, and you should be suspicious of anything that claims to. What they do is handle the markets where price shopping still works. Optimal Bet runs $8.33 per month for EV grading, odds comparison, and bet tracking in one place, which is a reasonable entry point if you want the sportsbook side covered without a serious subscription. If you want to see how that category works more broadly before committing, our rundown of odds comparison tools lays out what these products do. Line shopping is the part of a betting Saturday you can control. Parimutuel pools are not.
Final Thoughts
The Preakness is the Triple Crown leg that rewards paying attention. You have Derby form on most of the field, a manageable number of runners, and a genuine reason to have an opinion instead of a lottery ticket. The trade off is that everyone else can see the same thing, so the prices are shorter and the exotic pools are thinner.
Price your own horses before you look at the board, put the bulk of your money on win bets rather than wide exotics, and treat the takeout as the cost of admission it is. That is a race you can enjoy on the merits, whichever way it runs.
Preakness Betting FAQ
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