Quick Horse

[cosmo96]

I've recently purchased Quick Horse, but have had little success. I think it has potential, but so far it has not worked for me. I've just practiced/red boarded with little success. Before I make wagers with it can someone advice me? I bet to win if the odds are high enough, otherwise exactas. Any and all advise will be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

[acorn54]

I've recently purchased Quick Horse, but have had little success. I think it has potential, but so far it has not worked for me. I've just practiced/red boarded with little success. Before I make wagers with it can someone advice me? I bet to win if the odds are high enough, otherwise exactas. Any and all advise will be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

sorry to hear about your situation with your purchased software. i can tell you about my 14 plus years of using software for turf speculation. first of all i found that i threw my common sense out the window and expected my software to do all the work at selecting the winner in the race. that was, i found to be a big mistake. SOME software can give insights into races that you otherwise would not have. if this is what your software is doing for you, COMPLIMENT it with your own good judgement. that is solely my own opinion, others may be able to guide you otherwise, but expect them to be specific in their advice and that you see the wisdom of their viewpoint.

[FocusWiz]

I've recently purchased Quick Horse, but have had little success. I think it has potential, but so far it has not worked for me. I've just practiced/red boarded with little success. Before I make wagers with it can someone advice me? I bet to win if the odds are high enough, otherwise exactas. Any and all advise will be greatly appreciated. Thank you.I wish that horse players would be as willing to share as the greyhound users of QuickDog. Some of their comments are equally useful for QuickHorse, so you might look at those two forums.

First of all, understand that there are columns and methods with the methods being a collection of columns. Each column can contain whatever logic you want related to Horse Data, Race Data, or Outing Data. As I indicated somewhere else, you can create a column that multiplies the post position by the weight of the jockey if you want to but such a column will be unlikely to help you pick a winner.

Building columns is critical to your success. The columns pre-built for you are useful, but unlikely to create the kind of distinction you will need in order to identify criteria to select a likely winner. These columns use Reverse Polish Notation (the same as a standard desk calculator and an HP Pocket Calculator) to form them. Up to 8 columns make up a method (a column could also be based on a separate 8 column method, but I won't go into that).

The second thing that is critical to your success is the concept of "SuperTuning" which essentially tries to determine a weighting factor for each column based on how you have defined your track profiles. You really need to read their online manual (at their website) about track profiles and method filters. You can decide that you want to rate EP at 5.5, FX at 10, SP at 3, Jockey Win % at 2 and Trainer Win % at 25% or use SuperTuning to determine what combination has resulted in the highest win percentage or best ROI in prior races. You set the maximum number of races and the type of wager to be "tuned" for and it does the number crunching. For example, your wager might be to get the highest Win% for a Wager where the top three picks finished first or second in an exacta. This wager would be denoted 123/123. If you wanted to tune for the top two picks finishing first, and the top four finishing second, you would use 12/1234.

Beyond that there is SuperHandicapping an entire card (so you don't have to sit there for hours going race by race) and scripting so it will do this all by itself, and backtesting so that you know if other rules might improve results and culling and certain "first time setup" options (where you can have it compute an odds line based on your columns and methods). I have told them that 30 days is not enough for a preview and I think Mike may still allow PaceAdvantage members a short extension if asked genuinely enough.

I have used it for 18 months and still am struggling up the learning curve. My biggest problem is that I have difficulty envisioning data registers for the Reverse Polish Notation needed to access the data. This is not a complaint, but for example, if I want to create a column that takes the average speed of the highest two of the last three races, defaulting to the last race if there is only one, or the average of the last two if there are only two. I know this can be done using the if condition statements and the appropriate computations but have not sat through the testing and debugging that I would need in order to teach myself this logic. [Take the last race speed. If there are no other races, stop. If there is one other race, take the average, stop. If there are two other races take half of the higher of those. Take half of the higher of the lower of those and the last race. Add it to the half of the higher you computed earlier, stop. Yeah, something like that...I cannot figure out how to test it either.]

See if any of the above helps you understand what you are reading in their online manual.

Good luck!

[Pensacola Pete]

Quickdog has potential, because there aren't many whales playing it.

With Quickhorse, you're going to need to beat a different path than everybody else, so you don't always end up on the same thing that Wally Whale and Tony Tough are playing.

I'll give you three tips about Quickhorse. They aren't as applicable as for Quickdog because the nature of the sports are different.

First: Get away from the pre-made stuff. The same general thing is being used by Wally Whaler and Tony Toughbucks. You have to come up with combinations that they don't readily have, meaning custom columns and methods.

Second: Don't try to make one thing fit every track. It won't work. You need to mix and match for each track.

The third tip is about Supertune. If you find something that works well, and one of the columns has a very high weight, relative to the others, you should put that clomun in its own testing method to see how it works by itself. If it falls flat on its face, then you know that you ran into backfitting.