Quote:
Originally Posted by classhandicapper
It would be nice to know if their bets are tagged in some way that would allow someone to publish the exact numbers in each pool, their aggregate ROI etc..
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NYRA or any track could publish this but I suspect that it would be too much of a shocker for the general public to stomach.
Having looked at this for other tracks, their WPS ROI is lower for WPS than it is for the other intra-race exotics, though marginally so. Volume is volume though, so ROI will suffer from simply the size of the outlay versus the return of the straight pools. Their ROI for WPS barely breaks 90 cents on the dollar where as some of the other intra-race exotics come back in the 95 cents on the dollar range.
The teams are significantly better now at the inter-race exotics than they were before, even five years ago. And they are substantially better than the public in this regard.
The ironic thing is they probably get a better rebate in the exotic pools than the WPS pools and this is where the public is at a disadvantage, even more so in the jackpot pools where they are simply getting creamed compared to the teams.
My opinion would be for tracks to look more at rebate equilibrium than to deal with cutoffs. The teams are just better than the non-team public. Having cutoffs isn't going to change much for them and while everybody seems happy with the perception that there aren't as many late odds shifts....it's just one pool and as the data has shown, not much has actually changed. The general public is not getting the full picture on the true odds of horses across all pools like the teams can do.
As an aside, my belief is their most valuable asset is not so much the handicapping aspect. Everybody and their mother can come up with reasonably accurate pricing from just the handicapping data. It's not that hard a task. The hard thing is spitting out the bets in relation to the public and computing it all as all the pools come to a close. Basically there's 2 types of data - the data about the horses (handicapping) and the data about the betting (tote). By far the biggest upside for teams is dealing with the betting data - the general public is very poor at understanding it and the teams can deploy much more robust and speedy calculations than Joe Blow can. The handicapping data is not as important as many think. Having good handicapping data is like a quarter of the battle.
