I normally write about NBA basketball bets. But with all these new NFL quarterbacks getting drafted, I decided to call an audible of my own.

Today’s betting angle is going to be about the upcoming Kentucky Derby. It seems every gambler has a story about some score they made on the Kentucky Derby one year. They remember the name of the horse, the odds, how the race was run, who the favorite was. For every story you do hear, what you don’t are the 20 stories about the other years where they lost twice as much on the Derby as they won that time they got it right.

A lot of people will have opinions on who to bet on this weekend, but no one ever tells you how to bet, and that’s the edge I want to tackle. Betting $20 to win $30 is not a good story. If you agree with this statement, then betting the favorite is out. A 2-1 favorite should win that race 33% of the time, which means he is twice as likely not to win the race.

The payouts when a favorite wins tend to be small, as favorites tend to be over-bet. So, logically speaking, if the favorite is being over-bet, some other horses must be under-bet.

In horse racing, we refer to those horses as overlays. Anytime you can beat a heavy favorite, the payouts for doing so tend to be inflated higher than the actual chances of those combinations happening should be.

Usually after the top two or three contenders, you have a layer of horses that may be sitting at 10-1 or 15-1 odds. This tends to be the range where you have horses that fall into the overlay category. A horse at odds of 15-1 is being given a 6%-7% chance of winning the race, but the real chance for some of those horses is probably closer to 10% or higher.

A favorite may end up at 2-1 for a 33% implied chance of winning, but no horse in a 20-horse field is likely to have that high of a chance at winning this race. That horse would be over-bet, meaning there is value in some of his competitors.

If the true odds of that 15-1 horse are 10%, that means he wins this race one out of 10 times.

If you bet $100 on horses like this 10 times, you would have invested $1,000 total. Nine times you are likely to lose that bet, but remember, one in 10 times he does. You win a $100 bet times 15-1 odds for a payout of $1,500. You invested $1,000 and returned $1,500. You made a $500 profit as a long-term Kentucky Derby bettor, even after losing nine times. This is how to profitably bet the Kentucky Derby long term. If you are looking for a bigger score than that, the same theory applies about beating the favorite. Besides straight win betting, you can also make multi-horse wagers at the track known as exactas and trifectas. The payouts for these are even bigger.

For an exacta, you need to pick the correct finishing order of the top two horses in a race. A trifecta is the top three. They even have a superfecta, in which you need to pick the top four in the correct finishing order.

Some of the trifecta and superfecta bets are extremely tough to hit, as the number of combinations are in the thousands. For an exacta, even in a 20-horse field, you still have 380 possible combinations that could win. If you can catch an exacta without a heavy favorite involved, it could easily end up paying 50-1 or more at the Derby. That means if you bet one big-faced picture of Alexander Hamilton on it, you walk away with $1,000. That’s your best path to having a good Kentucky Derby betting story.

Now that you know how to bet the Derby, be more like Hamilton.

There is money to be made, make sure you are not going to waste your shot.