Angles = Tells?

[JustMissed]

There have been some nice discussions about angles lately, but does anyone else notice that horse playing angles are very similar to poker tells.

The amateur poker player quickly learns to observe the top ten tells but until his observation techniques improve he is forever bound to the low buy in tables.

Same for horseplayers. Weight off, drop in class, jockey switch, yada, yada, yada. Everyone at the track including the Red Hat ladies and the gal that sells popcorn knows these....Not much future there.

Gee, if only Doyle Brunson would write a book for horseplayers. :)

JM

[kenwoodallpromos]

Those are the "rules" of handicapping. I had to learn the "rules" before I could learn to break them (to break out of the mold).
The yada,yada, yada I use are contrarian so get no respect as real angles.
I look for what others overlook but are mathematically sound angles.

[Macdiarmadillo]

If you mean in the general sense of something that you know that gives you an edge, I say yeah. Otherwise tells are a head to head thing, a situation we really don’t get in racing. Maybe the closest there is is going into the last race of a tournament and anticipating how or what your opponents are going to play. But knowing lots of angles and their ROI would fall into the poker concept of not having a hole in your game. Trainer-specific angles then might fall into the realm of harder-to-read tells.

As for being stuck in the low-buy-in tables, I haven’t played poker in like 30 years, so I only know about current things secondhand. But back then, the lowest buy-in tables at the card clubs were the toughest. It still might be, at least for draw and low ball. This was draw poker for me then. If you thought you could find a tell with one of those geezers (and they usually were, some with Red Hats probably), you were sadly mistaken. These were the tightest players you could possibly imagine, in all senses of the word “tight”. I was the one tipping my hand by actually raising. Woe to me for bluffing with nothing; a guaranteed loss that would mean nothing to these regular players down the road.

I find out later that higher stakes games were very much looser. A friend of mine tried to get a guy who played like the tightest player at the low buy-in table to enter Vegas tournaments, even offering to front the entry fee, hotel, everything. The player refused every time. He probably knew he was emotionally incapable of pushing a $5 chip in, much less a $100 one. I knew this guy as Mr. Prices-for-everything-were-locked-in-in-1950, so that would not be a stretch of anyone’s imagination.

As for Doyle Brunson, I’d like to see how he would operate in our world with many more variables. If he’s going to work on physical tells, these are the one I’d want to know:

When a jock is thinking, “I know more than the trainer and other jocks, so I’m taking my horse way back this time as an experiment. So what if every winner today was a front runner.”

When a trainer is thinking, “Gee, the horse went nuts in the trailer but we shipped all this way so I guess we’ll run.”

When a trainer is thinking, “My bets made my horse 9-5, but if I win, they won’t repossess my house since I missed the last payment by betting the same horse last time. Hope that tendon holds up.”

When a horse is thinking "I could use a Pepto-Bismol right about now."

When an owner is thinking “We’re going to the Fountain of Youth next (or, wait, The Wood. Do they still run the Spiral Stakes at Latonia?).” :D