THE LATE GREAT HEUY MAHL

[HIGH ROLLER]

i have recently become aware of some of the great handicapping studies this man has done. any of the "old timers" on the board can offer any insight into huey mahl and his theories?

[charleslanger]

I read his publications(or attempted to anyhow), used his figures & programs until his unfortunate demise-- i think he was a genius in all areas: casino management, most games of chance, probabilities, betting(exotics, dutching horses to win, place-dutching!), bankroll management, medication, figures, pace, energy distribution, projecting stretching out & shortening up sprint to route & conversely-- most things that are standard today, that we take for granted-- he was espousing more than a half century ago.
He was so brilliant that you got the feeling his publications & conversations were heavily dumbed down so that us mortals could understand. He was definitely humongous IQ / Nobel Prize caliber-- any subject or profession you brought up: current events, psychology, politics, religion, etc.-- he could expound on for hours(no bs whatsoever either)-- one other person like that i've met in this business is Dave Schwartz-- both those guys are on a pedestal way above the rest of us.

[Dave Schwartz]

(Contrary to popular opinion, I am not Charles Langer as well as Dave Schwartz. <G>)

Charles,

Thank you for the kind words.


I knew Huey quite well. He was, first and foremost, a character... a Las Vegas version of a Runyonesque gambler. His real forte was innovation and adaptation. That is how he thought up stuff like "Length Variant."

I recall when he got my earliest ThoroBrain. TB was (then) a pace handicapping tool with a neural net to make the decisions from the model.

About 3 or 4 weeks after getting TB and after numerous support calls from his assistant (who someone here I am sure recalls - he had a strange nickname... help please), Huey calls and says, "Guess what we are doing with ThoroBrain? - Handicapping NFL games with it!"

They were creating a bunch of "two-horse races" between NFL teams and entering 10 data items into the user-defined fields. I was astounded!

That was Huey at his best.


BTW, he is the one that turned me on to incremental velocity in 1977, the year I moved from BJ to horses. I couldn't make it work, however, until I ran into Doc Sartin et al, in 1987.


Regards,
Dave Schwartz

[charleslanger]

¿Robbie Grieser was his 'general manager"?

Coincidentally--Dave, not too long afterwards, you wrote in Brain Waves about a newfangled football software that pointed out trends, i think....

[Dave Schwartz]

Robbie! Right!

Maybe I had a nickname for him... I recall meeting him once as well. Actually quite a bright fellow as I recall, b ut in Huey's shadow. And (for a short guy) he cast a pretty long shadow. <G>


Dave

[Topcat]

Originally posted by HIGH ROLLER
i have recently become aware of some of the great handicapping studies this man has done. any of the "old timers" on the board can offer any insight into huey mahl and his theories?

Huey Mahl was one of the great ones and a great writer. I woudl look forward to each of the Frontline newsletters he put out as much for the information as the writing. He was great with math and made it understandable. He also came up with some inovative ideas such as using the place bet as a dutch bet

He and his partner in the newsletter, I forget his name,
came up with a sure baseball bet-maybe th eonly one that I've never seen lose. Bet the home team in the World Series, double the bet until you win. It has won every year there has been a Workd Series-of cours eht home tema changes and you don't win much but it works

Anything of his that you can get your hands on read.

Others built on his work and he never let it bother him

[Figman]

I've got to agree....he was a master at both innovation and education when it came to handicapping and horseplayers. A regret I have in life is not having met the man in person. He did have some seminars with an oxygen tank along side. I still have the cassette tapes from one seminar. If around today with all the computer programs for research and related advances, he would be in heaven. I remember all he presented using a TI-67 programmable calculator, his unique nomographs for dutching, money management programs, energy distribution charts and on and on. I couln't wait for his newsletter to arrive each week. I was also a Length Variant subscriber. I think George Green was his programmer for a long time.

[charleslanger]

That Length Variant was such a great deal: for $20-30 monthly one received adjusted pace/final figs for all tracks--all three calls, track surface condition with weather & temperature, track profile / bias, race rating, class rating, unusual / relevant trip notes / race comments, etc. One received these weekly, and as Figman notes, the included articles provided with the figs were invaluable-- cutting edge, thinking outside the bun....

[Tom]

I used Length Variant for a while at NYRA tracks-really made a lot of money with them. I would regularly find stand out fig horses going off at 5-1, 6-1, 7-1. LV was well wortht he price.
I even made a visual pace method based on the LV - 2 furlongs in :21 = 0, so a horse running three back against a 22.3 pace earned a "11." For the half mile, it was 42=0, so a horse running three behind a pace of 45.1 earned a "19."
I could visually calculate early pace rating for every race in a couple of seconds, and get numbers like 12-23, 10-21, 6-33, etc. You would be surprised how close a lot of the races would be using raw times or even the DRF variant. It was a real useful way to do the match up for Sartin programs. Coupled with running style analysis, it worked very easy as a contender selection.
After a while, I wrote a program for the Sharp Handheld computers that used the Beyer number to get the varaint and then calculted full pace ratings wehre 0=best and used this (and the Total Pace verison of the readouts) for several years.