I liken them to those horse racing machines in seaside amusements where you placed your 2p in the slot & had a choice of horses.
There was nothing quite like the glee generated when white came in and you were on it.....until, ofc, progressing to real horses and getting a winner!
Is fantasy horse racing a scam?
There probably are some around that are scams, or more likely just plain rubbish. Don't know about this one, but (assuming it offers real cash prizes) I doubt it's got enough players to make the pools worthwhile.
You can take the example of the Tote's fantasy horse racing as a good example of one that's definitely not a scam. The problem is it's £7 an entry (although occasionally there are free games with small prizes), and evidence suggests there are enough savvy/lucky punters playing regularly that, to win any worthwhile amount (ie at least cover the entry fee a few times over), you pretty much have to find at least 3 or 4 winners in that game's 7 selections + a couple of placers, + one of the winners needs to be at least a little on the unexpected side.
Do that, and you end up thinking you might have been better off win-betting on those winners.
It can offer some fun with the potential of a nice enough win, though. The format is interesting, where each horse has a 'value' and you have to pick one in each of the 7 races such that your total stable value doesn't go over 10,000 guineas. The price of each horse varies from 100 guineas upwards, normally to 6000 guineas for a very strongly fancied selection. If you consider that COT would probably have been valued at something like 8000 guineas the other day, you can see you'd have had to do some heavy thinking to get a chance of a win with only a budget of 2000 for your other 6.
So there's some strategic thinking involved. Theoretically, on that day, it might have been better to go against COT, get the 2nd, and aim to rack up points on the other races.
I've probably played it about 10 -15 times in the last year or so, and won £93 once. So just about break-even/small loss. Maybe I'm just rubbish at it, ofc.
tote.co.uk