Betting Recap:How did your bets fare in the Kentucky Derby, Preakness and Belmont Stakes?

The internet has made horse racing convenient and accessible for everyone. If you know how to choose the winning race horses, you can make a fortune by betting on your favorite horse from the convenience of your home. For rookies who have only started placing horse racing bets this year, now is a good time to review and recap how your bets fared in the recent big races.

With the first half of the racing season over and the Kentucky Derby, Preakness and Belmont Stakes finished, how did your pick 6 bets go? Did you make substantial winnings in any or all of these races?

Pick 6 Refresher Course

Waging on a ticket that has all the Pick 6 winners can bring you a windfall of money. However, guessing all 6 winners of 6 consecutive horse race games is no easy task. To complicate matters, you can increase your chances of winning Pick 6 by coming up with several of the 6 winning combinations but you have to place a bet on each so that increases your cash outlay for every ticket.

If you are an individual playing alone, you need a lot of luck and tons of cash to be able to sustain holding on to this winning ticket.You can look back on the racing history of the horses and the odds of each of the winners. By making your combinations online you can even make an estimate of the probable dividend payouts in each race or ticket combination. This helps you determine what ticket combination to bet on and the timing of your entry into every race.

You must remember that it is essential that you have a solid betting bank at your disposal. Constructing several winning combinations can be very costly and unless you are betting alone, you must have the cash to invest in these combinations. A strong word of advice, if you have a betting bank, bet your stakes at 1% of its amount so you do not lose everything due to a bad decision.

Pick 6 softwares can be very helpful and reliable in determining the winning ticket. But as we all know, the end of the races are always unpredictable. These softwares help in minimizing your errors but bottom line, it just narrows down your choices to the highest probability of winners in several combinations than just betting on a single straight wager.

Safety in Numbers

In the end, it will be more beneficial to join a Pick 6 Syndicate with minimal investment and bigger chances of winning. The syndicates are usually the groups of players that have more money to invest in creating more combinations and are able to hold on to that winning ticket when everyone else has cashed out of the race. They are able to play in the combinations where the odds seem to be against their favor.

Sometimes, the race is won by a handicap, which is hard to predict if you don't have the necessary tools to determine the win. By playing along with a syndicate, you increase your chances of winning by betting on combinations that seem unlikely to bring in a win.

The Next Big Race

The next big event in the horse racing world is the Breeder's Cup, slated to take place in November. If you're serious about wanting a share of the million-dollar pick 6 prize usually up for grabs on those days, you better have a tried and tested system of your own as early as possible.

You can sign up for a pick 6 betting syndicate as early as now and try betting on a few races to see how it goes. For more information, visit http://pickwinnersclub.com/.

Betting and Social Media

In the years past, engaging in any form of gambling was frowned upon. It had been associated with devious characters that have nothing better to do than gamble all their money away. Small gambling dens were highly illegal and were usually located in seedy areas. The larger casinos were the only legal gambling sites but back then, it was not necessarily accepted as a place in which an essentially morally good person will not enter.

Over the years however, gambling has taken in some changes and has added new forms. Race track horse betting, sports betting, bingo and Lottery gaming have entered the world of gambling. Lottery gaming, in particular, has become widely popular amongst a wide spectrum of social class. Both the rich and poor alike have joined the lottery in the hopes of gaining big winnings. Moreover, in this day and age of economic crisis, more and more people have turned to the game of luck to obtain a better chance in upgrading their social standing and overall lifestyle.

Since the popularity of the gambling industry has flourished, people nowadays are no longer ashamed of expressing their interest in joining in the hype of it all. Once considered as a taboo, it is now widely accepted and no longer looked down upon. Asides from the basic verbal discussions about gambling, various social media engines have become instant discussion rooms on various topics regarding the game of luck.

These social media facilities such as Twitter, Facebook, FLickr, Google Plus and Tumblr have become instant sites for gamers to express their insights about each and every form of gambling. Most gambling discussions include poker, Horse racing and the lottery. Moreover, gamblers need not go through various sites to get the latest news and winning numbers. They simply add, for example, the Facebook or Twitter account of that particular Lottery game and instantly gain access to all the news and feedback their regular websites has to offer.

Asides from lottery tips, poker techniques, and horse racing news, these various social media have now entered the world of Lottery gaming. Finding the latest news, winning numbers or lottery draw results and various tips and information regarding this particular game of chance has now become highly accessible. In addition to this, online forums have been established to give support to other lottery gamers as well as relay information about various international games, thus making international lottery gaming more accessible to the masses.

Save Yourself From Lottery Scams

Most often, lottery scammers will send people letter or e-mail announcing that they won a big prize in a lottery. Typically, scammers use the name of popular lottery games such as Mega Millions or Powerball and even use official-looking papers with the logo and letterhead of the lottery or the lottery entry provider.

Scam emails usually use what appear to be legitimate addresses such as MegaMillionsPrizes@______.com or U.S.PowerballPrizes@_____.com. For the unsuspecting or the naive, they seem to appear legitimate and they will simply fall for the scam.

The letter or the email will then require the supposed-to-be winner to reply with their personal information so they can send the prize money. In some instances, the letter also contains a real-looking check for a few hundred or few thousand dollars. Of course, the check is not real but it will be enough to make some people really excited and get hooked with the scam.

The bottom line of the scam is that they want you to send them money. Scammers will tell you that you need to send them payment for the taxes on your winnings before you can get your prize. In the event that they send you a check, they will tell you that you have to send first your payment for the taxes before they can clear the check for payment. If the amount in the check is in the thousands of dollars and the amount that you need to pay in the form of tax will be only a few hundreds, you might really be tempted to do just what they are asking you to do thinking that after all, you already have in your possession their check.

If you fall for it and you send the payment for the tax, usually through Western Union, you will discover later that the check in your possession is fake. The bank will not honor it.

Don't fall for the scam

In these days when almost everybody is trying to make a fast buck out of anybody, people must not be so naive to fall for lottery scams. The only thing to remember here is that you do not win a prize for a contest or a lottery game you did not enter. When you receive a letter or an e-mail announcing that you won, you will know right away that it is a scam when you know you did not play any lottery game online. If you do play a lottery game by buying a ticket, you will never get a letter or e-mail announcing that you won because you have the ticket with you and nobody will ever know the numbers in your ticket.

Warning bells of a scam

In addition to the fact that you did not enter any lottery game online, the following are clear give-away of a scam:

The e-mail address of the lottery uses Yahoo or Hotmail. Legitimate lottery games have their own domain name.

Most of the scams originate from non-English speaking countries and errors in spelling and wrong grammar could be a simple give-away. The spelling and grammar could be correct but the wording or the phrasing could be strange and uncommon in the United States.

Description of the prize you are supposed to have won does not match the prize category of the lottery game they are referring to. Example, the letter may announce that you have won $20 million in the prize category "A" of U.S. Mega Millions or U.S. Powerball. There is no such thing as category "A" prize in either lottery.

The name of the lottery game is the name of a company that is not involved in lotteries such as Microsoft, Apple, Google, or even Los Angeles Times.

The letter or e-mail will mention that the lottery is sponsored by a famous individual such as Bill Gates,  Jesse Jackson, or the Sultan of Brunei. Lotteries are not sponsored by individual persons.

You won in the lottery as a result of your participation in a survey. Legitimate surveys do not offer prize money. Surveys that offer prize money or lottery tickets will be asking for your personal information to participate, a scheme practice by ID thefts.

The letter or email announces that the participants in the lottery were selected randomly through e-mail addresses from different countries.

The lottery involves a claim agent and you have to go through this agent before you can claim your prize money.

There is a strong warning that you must keep your winning the lottery strictly confidential and must not be known by the public until the prize money has been finally remitted to  your bank account.

The most important warning bell of a scam is the request for money. Usually, the first letter or e-mail will not ask you for anything yet but information on where to remit the prize money. As you show your interest in the prize money, the 2nd or 3rd letter or e-mail will then ask you to transmit through Western Union an amount of money as either agent's fee or tax payment before your winnings will be remitted to your bank.

Getting involved into this kind of scam could prove messy. In instances where you are asked to deposit a check or money order to you bank and you have to send or remit back to an unknown account a lesser amount, you will end up paying the full amount of the money you send only to learn later that the check you deposited in your own account bounced or is fake.

The best thing to do when you receive a letter with the announcement that you win in a lottery you did not enter is simply to toss the letter. If the announcement comes in the form of an e-mail, just delete it. Or, you can forward it to agencies such as osalotteries.net/scamwatch which monitor and update the public on most recent lottery scams.

If you want your lottery dreams to come true, you must do something about it. Go to legitimate lottery service providers to purchase your lottery tickets or sign up for a subscription. Only then can you start dreaming big.