Does each public handicapper have a specialty?--are there ways to examine this?
 

Is there a way to know what each public handicapper is good at in terms of picking winners or how well they do across the board?

In other sports you can know an athletes' specialty. For example, in basketball I have seen numerous occasions where they can tell you how well a player does inside the paint as opposed to the perimeter. Baseball is so scientific that they have now incorporated defensive shifts for many players, so much so, that it is being said that run production is down due to the increase in defensive shifting.

For this sport, as far as I know, there is no way to determine the accuracy of a particular public handicapper. How well do they do in dirt/turf races or sprint/route races etc.?

I have done some things on my own but there's nothing official as far as I can tell.

Almost 3 decades ago I entered all the from the consensus every day for California and New York for an entire year.

I found many patterns and actually built a handicapping system (in spreadsheets; Boeing Calc, actually).

At the time I had thought it had great promise. However, when I put it into play (having developed a weight-based model based upon type of race), I got absolutely destroyed over the course of a week.

About 3 weeks later I reached out to a friend who worked at the DRF in L.A. and received an answer to a significant question: "What happens when Sweep goes on vacation?" The answer was that someone else takes over for him.

"Did he go on vacation 3 weeks ago?" The answer was that he had, in fact, been gone for a week and someone "around the office" made the picks instead.


IMHO
One would be much better off creating 5 different systems based upon 5 different reports/strategies and treating each one as a selector. It would likely be much more consistent and could possibly lead you to something.

I am not suggesting this is a viable approach to a make-a-living system. I am suggesting that it is as viable way to model as many other approaches.


Best of luck.

Thanks Dave I do seem to remember a stat for Sweeps like 30 wins in 180 attempts or something to that nature. It also had the win return in terms of $2 win bet per the number of attempts.

I guess what I want to know is, if there was ever a further breakdown of his 30 wins? Did the majority of his wins come in sprints versus routes dirt versus turf etc.?

I don't think there was anything definitive in terms of what was his specialty.

I also don't think they keep that stat to make it available for everyone.

I have no knowledge of the stats you are referring to.

What I was referring to was a more complex approach that considered all of the handicappers, and assigned individual weights for each one, depending upon the number of consensus points.

I do believe that the public handicappers have strengths. You would have to follow them and check them yourself to figure out who is good at what. Another thing, some handicappers may actually have better results with the horses they pick second or third. Years ago I met a guy who kept precise stats on my harness picks for a period of seven years, and he had my picks broken down into various categories, such as cold exactas, boxed exactas, top pick win % and ROI, best bet win % and ROI, and he compared me against every other public handicapper in NY, including all newspaper handicappers and some of the tip sheet handicappers. I had profits in several categories including huge profits on my Best Bets and I was the only handicapper who had profits. He did it all on paper. I think he was an accountant, but he was very precise and neat. I met him a couple of times, very nice guy.

In the 1940s Esquire magazine had an article about tracking the handicappers by strengths & weaknesses. I'm guessing that no one made a fortune using this method.
Today there is software that would allow you to track these handicappers, by distance , surface, class whatever. This is not an avenue that I'd want to go down, but I'd be curious to see a large sample.
At one time the late Dave Feldman, handicapper for the Chicago Sun Times had a huge following & could influence the pools by his picks. Before going to the track I'd often view his odds line to get an ideas of what kind of odds I could expect. If I only liked one horse & it was Feldman's bet of the day, I wouldn't bother going to the track because for sure it would be bet down to 3-5. He did have a few holes in his game one of which was overvaluing a horse that broke it's maiden by a wide margin. A lot of these horses had perfect trips & faced inferior competition. When they moved up to NW2, they were often undeserving favorites.
There was one very fast Illinois bred, that couldn't win beyond 6 furlongs. Nonetheless Feldman would always put this horse on top & the crowd followed. Cashed a few tickets betting against.

Russ Harris did picks for the NY Daily News for many years and his picks may have affected the odds. He picked a lot of favorites but he was very good at picking winners and it was not unusual to see him pick 6 or 7 winners on top. He also picked all 9 winners on top in 9 races one time.

This is the kind of stat you have to do your own legwork to find, and it's good that you do because if they flashed on the screen "Handicapper Smith is picking 37% winners in turf routes" or it was in the DRF, everyone and their cousin would be on it anyway. Everyone has strengths and it doesn't hurt to know those of anyone whose opinion you're using.

Blast from the Past: The DOT System, by Howard Henkin

https://news.google.com/newspapers?n...,2094790&hl=en

Just place a dot next to the name of horse mentioned by public handicappers in various publications, and horse with most dots; VOILA, we have a winner!

The only way I think its possible would be if you know the type of handicapper they are. Are the trip handicappers, have they previously stated an affinity or specialty..whether speed,sprints, turf etc. Otherwise its seems like a crapshoot. On the few occasions where I might read a public handicappers analysis ( ALWAYS done after my handicapping to avoid any subliminal pull ), if they mention a horse that I either was confused on or threw out, I will go back to see if I missed something.

If you had a consensus of the best public handicappers and used the dot system but only bet the horses that were ranked 1st or 2nd that were not the favorite I would imagine you'd get some nice overlays.

Just looking at New York, Serling, Beer, and Aragon are all good trip handicappers but I think they each have a different perspective on class and speed. Newsday's Steve Matthews picks a lot of longshot winners but he uses things like last quarter and workouts to a greater degree than most public handicappers. Kipness (Wizard) does his homework but I'm not sure how to classify him as a handicapper, in terms of style. I'm definitely a pace handicapper because I think you can get more longshot winners from pace than from trips.

The guys who use speed figures usually pick the highest percentage of winners. I believe Russ Harris did his own numbers, and so did Vinny Abate, who had a tip sheet in New York, and Connie, who also had a tip sheet. Connie and Vinnie were doing Ragozin style speed figures right around the same time Ragozin started.

I specialize in maiden races, especially second-time starters coming off nondescript (bad paper, I call it) first tries. I have no data on this, but I believe tlg (Andy Serling) is strong on these kind of horses. If I see something at long morning-line odds, and Andy has it mentioned or on top, I know it's going to be live.

Maiden races are great to specialize in...sound horses, workouts actually mean something, you can spot hidden talent, trip handicapping helps, pace handicapping is great for maiden races, speed figures don't mean much and there are so many other things you can use that can be helpful, like breeding, trainer angles, equipment changes, stride length....

Old PA thread on Public Handicappers
 

Check this out from 2004:

http://www.paceadvantage.com/forum/a...p/t-14101.html