As John Lawler points out, "betting on" is the correct phrasing to communicate which outcome you are supporting or predicting. If I understand your question correctly, it is only missing the element which identifies your choice as having been chosen for being the likely winner.
A likely outcome, in betting terms, is a safe bet. It is difficult to suggest a construction without any context, but you might say "I consider X a safe bet," or "I'm going with the safe bet."
"Hedge your bets" means to position yourself to benefit regardless of the outcome by betting on both sides of an issue in an effort to play it safe.
Figurative Meaning
According to the website Words and Phrases from the Past the expression means
- a valuable hint (to tell or give information)
It matches the third example
Look here, you naturalist, and I'll put a wrinkle on your horn [I'll give you a hint]. Yonder
hangs a magnificent bunch of fruit that I very much desire to possess
A second variation I found was "Well, that's a new wrinkle in my horn"
We love to get comments about the column. If the readers have heard
the expressions that we share they tell us so. But if they haven't, we
are sometimes answered with, "Well, that's a new wrinkle in my horn."
- Which is self-explanatory, a sort of I learnt something new today, something else to add to my collection, a novel thought. This fits quite well with the second quote
Let some respectable citizens, gen'lemen, come and take my last dying
confession. It'll put a wrinkle or two in their horns, I'll warrant
them !
i.e It will surprise/shock them = something new.
Source: Bittersweet
Online Etymology Dictionary reports,
wrinkle (n.)[...]that of "idea, device, notion" (especially a new one) is from
1817.
Why Wrinkles?
From a book entitled Ellis's Husbandry: Abridged and Methodized (1772) there is the following excerpt which confirms @josh61 answer that farmers read the wrinkles on cow horns in order to guess their age, just as many do with the rings on a tree trunk.
This is a surer sign than the wrinkles in a cow's horn, by which we
guess at their age; because they seldom have more than one wrinkle or
circle, till five years old, and that sooner or later, according to
the time of her calving; but an oak, ash, fir, hazel, and most other
woods, shew these marks at three or four years old, when they are about
the bigness of one's thumb
Here is an excerpt from the Australian Enquiry Book (1897)
by Mrs Lance Rawson
To tell the Age of a Cow
At two years of age you will find a wrinkle at the base of the cow's horns, but it is >not fully developed till she turns three. When five years old another wrinkle will form, and after five she will get a new one each year of her life.
Every time you learn something new your brain wrinkles
There is the myth that the brain forms new wrinkles every time new information is stored. Many believe that the more wrinkles the human brain has, the more intelligent that person is. It's only recently that science has proven false that conviction, but it is one that still persists even today, like a popular old wive's tale.
Q. What do brain wrinkles have to do with how smart you are?
A. A lot of wrinkles seems to have more to do with what makes humans smarter than lower animals than with what might have made Einstein smarter than you. [...] Human intelligence appears to be related to the branching of brain cells and the formation of complex links between them, not the shape of the platform where the links take place.
I manage to unearth a very early reference that confirmed people believed every new wrinkle represented a new understanding; this folklore predates Etymonline's estimation by a sizeable ninety-three years, and is found in Jonathan Swift's tale The Wonderful Wonder of Wonders, written in 1720
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/31/science/q-a-brain-folds.html
Earlier Example of the Idiom
The earliest written example that combined the words new, wrinkle, and horn is in The Medico-chirurgical Review, 1830, New York
Note the variation, to add a wrinkle to the horn (of knowledge)
Best Answer
A bit of context to where this comes from might help. This is pretty clearly a humorous transposition of phrases. It's mixing up "Don't do drugs, eat your vegetables, stay in school"
I don't think it's meant to have a specific meaning since it's likely just someone joking around.