Morning lines revisited
 

I have no idea who the morning line-maker is at Delta Downs, but I almost started a thread here in order to lambast him for the egregious error of assigning the 9/5 favoritism to the :9: in today's (Wednesday's) 3rd race. And then I watched this same :9: close strongly in the mud to just miss winning the race at odds of 22/1. So...I am now starting a thread so I can tip my hat to this man...just in case he knows something that the rest of us don't. :ThmbUp: :)

morning lines are supposed to predict what crowd will make horse, not what the linemaker predicts are odds of winning

LOL it might not even be a man making the ML could be a computer :pound:

yes, that's true

but isn't it well known that the crowd generally prices the horses correctly?

so then, what he is doing is the same thing as predicting what the true odds are once the takeout is factored out

correct?


edit: although I do notice that linemakers often seem to price a very strong horse at 7/5 or 9/5 when it looks like he'll almost surely be odds on. being a suspicious person by nature I assume that is intentional - since there is generally more interest in a race if there is not a prohibitive fave - that basically he is trying to make less experienced bettors believe they can get a halfway decent price on the monster horse



*

More importantly...
 

How in the heck did a 9/5 ML favorite at any track in any race get ignored to the point that it went off at post time at 22-1 ?!


Certainly, this is a rare occurence, no?


I pray every race that my 9/5 favorites doesn't go down to 4/5 by post time (as they inevitably do)!



Yikes.

Delta Downs? I’m from Louisiana and I don’t mess with that place. Evangeline either, and it’s just down the road.
#shadygoingson

Several years ago I was watching the favorite in a race at Delta Downs. I watch favorites when I'm not betting on a race to see the jockey's "interest" in winning the race since a longer odds winner would appeal to certain betting interests. During the race, on the far turn, the field had separated into two groups with the favorite in the gap between them making it easy to watch him. The jockey jerked the horse's head back hard and then did it again, causing him to fall back and get swallowed up by the second group. This even caused the shocked TVG hosts to start to say something and then stop as if avoiding commenting on something so egregious and obvious. The favorite finished out of the money of course. I'll never bet at Delta Downs and probably any Penn tracks either.

A Louisiana Racing Story
 

About 6yrs ago, on the eve of LaChampions Night at EvD, I had a guest in my restaurant whom I’ve gotten to know pretty well (through our mutual love of horse racing) who also happened to be a former elected official on The Hill in Wash DC. In other words, the dude had some connections in many places.
He told me to take a long look at all of Mark Guidry’s mounts.
He won three races and ran 2nd in another.
Hmmmm....I made a nice score or two but it also told me not to bet that track without inside info.

Favorites in general go lower than ML for several reasons. Primarily, because longshots eat too many points on a correctly balanced line. A real-time tote, for instance, holds no-hopers at 35-1..45-1..99-1..etc, but although I have begun pricing entrants as high as 50-1 (30-1 long held as my max), no maker will, or should (for several reasons) go high enough often enough to free up sufficient points for chalk on the other end of the spectrum.

Also, an actual 4/5 shot pegged 7/5 on the ML does not constitute such an embarrassing miscue, but to price a horse 4/5 that ends up odd-on DOES look bad. At least in my opinion.

***ENDS UP 7/5

In most minor league tracks the hot dog vendor,or the program seller, usually are assigned the ML making duties🇬🇷😎

I know of one track at which the print-shop operator used to tinker with the line before putting it into the official program. And alter the condition book in accordance with his own half-baked notions.

If you have served in the capacities that I have, neither conceit surprises you, since those are two areas in which EVERYBODY is an expert.

i think we need to revisit why morning lines started to begin with...

some may remember years ago the Armstrong numbers.. that was a sheet that came out every day that had their odds tagged to them for every horse in a race.. an entry would have had different odds for the 2 or more horses in the entry.. then they rated the horses from top to bottom and assigned an order to them and called the horses Armstrong 1, 2, 3, 4 etc. etc. all numerically.

when you bet your horses with a bookmaker whether it was on the phone or in person, you called the Track like Bowie. 5th at Bowie Armstrong 3 was the example.

the morning lines were used by the bookmakers to give him an idea how much of a hazard he had to booking the horse..

towards the end of the Armstrong sheet, they used the track morning line until they went out of business. before that the Armstrong line was pretty respected.

50 years ago, The Armstrong was the bookmakers bible.

ya john gimmy a 10 dollar daliy double at suffok armstrong:headbanger: one and one those were the days !