handycapper
 

anyone have any same data or information on thisn program?

my understanding is the information/program utilizes Equibase data,
and the program is no longer available due to possible litigation from
Equibase; simply trying to determine the differences, beween
handycapper and Formulator/Stat lens.

thanks

It's talked about in this thread.

http://www.paceadvantage.com/forum/s...d.php?t=145714

Equibase asked him to distributing the program.
He was on ATR with Steve Byk Friday and Byk will be talking more about it this week.

Right now it is not available.
From what I gather, it parses information from FREE charts and allows you to put it into a spreadsheet.

Handycapper
 

Tom

Thanx for the reply.

Gary

here's a link to a story about the developer



http://www.thoroughbreddailynews.com...-work-with-us/

The reaction of the "industry" to this nice piece of open source code is at least disappointing and representative of a stubborn adhesion to antiquated and narrow minded marketing theories!

"They" try to do whatever possible to disallow any kind of tech innovation that has the potential to provide a fresh restart and some hope to the game. Following this approach only will accelerate the decline of the game as it results to a very "hostile" environment for the younger generation who expect something above excel spreadsheets and twentieth century dinosaur "programs" like those that so often are mentioned here in PA!

Why don't you write the killer 21st century "program" and lead us out of the dark ages?

Better yet, post some picks for a while, blow us all away, and show us how it really can be.

My point? If you're going to take a dump on "20th century dinosaur" programs, at least point to some examples of what could be.

This program handycapper isn't some genius bit of coding. Chart parsers have been around in one form or another forever...nothing all that original there.

If someone is in such dire straits that they can't afford data files or the DRF, they probably shouldn't be betting in the first place. Agree?

Believe me, I am really busy writing real killer 21 century apps (some of them used by hundreds of millions of users) so there is no incentive for me to spend my time in such a small market.

Posting picks and trying to prove my case is something that I find neither challenging nor beneficial; note that when it comes to handicapping I have nothing to sell, I do not have
web site that tries to generate income from horse racing and I have not any type of professional affiliation with the industry.

I do not agree.

This program can be considered innovative (to avoid confusion and misunderstandings please note that I am not saying evolutionary or much less revolutionary) because it proposes a standardization in the collection of open domain data , implements a solution and distributes it as open source code allowing other developers to build on top of it and improve it in various ways as time goes on.

Although it is correct that these data can be purchased, the cost in not negligible for a young data scientist who wants to tests his theories and possibly advance the communal understanding of the game, For example, if this project was allowed to fly, it would had been possible to publish related data to a site like https://www.kaggle.com/, create a competition and have some very bright people running their experiments on it.

Unfortunately the industry is lead by mediocre people with a very myopic view when it comes to innovation and improvements in the overall process.

So you have the means to advance the communal understanding of the game, but you don't think it's worth your time, personally?

Not sure what you mean here,as I do not "have" these means; they are part of the public domain.Also I do not have the time to work on a solution; even if I had it I am not a firm believer that the reward is worthing the effort. It is possible to create a profitable approach albeit with very low betting frequency something that is certainly not fun to do and is very difficult to apply due to the extremely low level action. Even worse, due to the smallness of the pools the final PNL will not justify the necessary work.

Random examples of what I mean can be seen here:

https://www.kaggle.com/hrosebaby/fea...se-racing/code

https://www.kaggle.com/lukebyrne/hor...r-courses/home

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=...uHxxFr3YEs1H74

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/pre...8691093844.pdf

These "kernels", similarly to any other ML solution I have seen published(including Benter's paper about multinomial logit) cannot provide a good solution to the problem. At best they might result to a slightly better outcome to morning line or a good aggregate metric like bris prime power.

The main problem of these approaches lies in the weakness of the provided features; a model can be improved by improving the predictive value of the metrics that is fed with, something that requires a large universe of data, some basic handicapping ability and a lot of manual work as the training process relies mostly in trial and error rather to a specific set of steps that need to be followed.

An open source tool like then one we are discussing in this thread, has the potential to
improve the data collection process and the other layers to clean normalize, divide them in train - test - validation sets etc. This pipeline can grow dramatically as more parameters are added to the model and having multiple developers will certainly make the task more feasible. Having such a tool silently running as a backend service can allow for a large community of data miners to constantly running their models, allowing them to interact among each other and create the ultimate handicapping platform.

HANDYCAPPER
 

HELP:
Does any here remember the process of download charts/info into the HANDYCAPPER. I have downloaded the program (already).

HANDYCAPPER
 

Thanks for update.

Actually, I believe it works up to Aug 12, 2018 when the PDF's were modified. If you're loading prior pdf's, (to track/research things) it should work.

If someone is in such dire straits that they can't afford data files or the DRF, they probably shouldn't be betting in the first place. Agree?[/QUOTE]

Really?

That’s the kind of attitude that is the problem with the industry to begin with. Instead of making it easier for beginners to study and explore solutions they make it increasingly harder to attract new younger blood that may have new ideas about handicapping.

We need more players in the pool by not making it harder for beginners to try to come up with new solutions, or what they think are new solutions. That would start by providing at least some free past data.

How many successful poker players started playing penny poker before they graduated to dollars. With all the free help online the poker population grew quite big.


Add the cost of past performances and results data puts a cap on who will at least try to solve the handicapping problem.