Could it be that where mighty HBO failed, the fledgling Esquire Network has succeeded?

Esquire’s “Horseplayers,” a reality series that begins on Tuesday night and follows a collection of high-rolling people who bet the horses, is a diverting look at a colorful if troubled industry. From the initial episode, it doesn’t appear as if the series intended to delve into the behind-the-scenes aspects of horse racing, but it makes amusing fare out of the more public side: the races and the characters who bet on them.

One of HBO’s most spectacular failures in recent years was “Luck,” a scripted series about the horse racing world, with big-name stars like Dustin Hoffman and Nick Nolte. It made its debut in January 2012 amid much publicity, but was shut down a few months later, after three horses died during production.

“Luck” was serious television; “Horseplayers” has no such pretensions. The pilot opens at Aqueduct in Queens, where “Team Rotondo” — a father-son combination and a family friend — is trying to hit a Pick 6 (six winners in a row), and an old-school bettor named John Conte is fixated on a horse named Al Dente. It also looks in on Santa Anita Park in Arcadia, Calif., where Christian Hellmers applies an odd combination of homework and New Age ritual to his quest to win big.

Image Horseplayers From left, Andrew Yex, a producer on this new Esquire Network show, with the handicappers Peter Rotondo Sr. and Matt Bernier at Santa Anita Park in Arcadia, Calif. The series starts on Tuesday. Credit... Walter Iooss/Esquire Network

Other professional horseplayers will be introduced in later episodes, building to the National Handicapping Championship, a tournament for bettors. These people are risking hundreds or thousands of dollars at a time, and the show is crisply edited to bring out the excitement inherent in a horse race on which a lot is riding.