The Ph.D. project is based on a long term fieldwork among gamblers at an Indian Race Course. At the racecourse exists a market for risks - through odds - in between legal and illegal economies. In this setting, I argue, it is not the strenght of the horses that are central, but rather the assumptions about the intentions of people, believed to have the power to bend the future and manipulate the risk market. The excitement of betting thus has to do with the excitement of trying to figure out and benefit from how the economic system works in terms of insider information, bribes and money transfers. For the understanding of this system, I among other things investigate debates concerning the legality of gambling, practices of secrecy, communication technology, discourses of corruption and systems of credit. I do so while comparing with work within the anthropology of finance and while engaging with one of the first ethnographic texts on gambling written by Clifford Geertz. The Ph.D. study shows how the betting market both reflects global models for risks markets as well as economic practices and cosmologies in urban India.