Quote:
Originally Posted by thaskalos
"It doesn't matter if there are 2 horses or 20. There is the same amount of error."
A comment that boggles the mind.
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It is correct to say that it doesn't matter if there are two horses or twenty horses, the probability of a winner is 1.00. It can't be greater than 1 and it can't be less than zero.
OK. You can argue there are dead heats, coupled entries, and no-contests. Forget about those. In every race that has ever been declared official with one winner, there was a chance of 1.00 that the horse would win.
For example, you are at home watching the TV. You saw the race live earlier in the day. Someone asks you what the chance is that the horse would win. The answer is 100%.
If they asked you before the race then you might have a different answer. If you say 100% you might be right, but then again you might not be. If you are wrong you made an error and the horse actually had zero chance. In fact, every horse that lost had zero chance. If there are 10 horses in the race and there were nine losers then sum of the chances of the losers winning are 0%.
If it was a match race and Horse AA won where the public's betting gave AA a 60% chance of winning and BB a 40% chance of winning then the public made a 60% error before the race about BB and only a 40% error on AA's chances.
In reality, AA had a 100% chance of winning, but no one knew the true chances before the race. After the fact, the true error on AA was 0% and it was 100% on BB. However, the betting public made a 40% error on AA and 60% on BB.
There may have been some highly skilled bettors who knew AA was a lock. The error of the highly skilled bettors on AA and BB was smaller than the public in general, but the sum of the highly skilled bettors' errors was still 100%.
For any given horse in any give race the amount of betting error is going to range from 0% to 100%.
I don't know how to make it any clearer.
