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[CincyHorseplayer]

Where I have arrived at has absolutely nothing to do with escaping variance or not having a certain temperament for A or B. As your thinking changes and you evolve what you discover is that it is not all black and white and basic as it seems. For one in my first post one of the greatest realizations I have made is exactly embracing the reality of variance and battling it in the form of more bets as opposed to less bets. That it is through 100 or more bet cycles that it evens out and that approach would get you to where you are going. But most of the discovery had to do with what to do with new ratings and new analysis and analyzing it in a statistical manner. While at first I tried to create weighted models across the degrees of success with several rankings I realized that it distorted what a good bet was and that the strongest rating that was showing up in a track profile was what to play. The other thing I had to personally overcome is the desire to handicap the horses to be bet when they fit. It was a case where the strength was the statistic and it demanded to be bet period or you would handicap away profitability. It was hard to go against my own nature. It was hard to comprehend that betting ALL of the profile horses to win would yield a bigger return even if the overall ROI might go down with a more selective approach. It's all about more return right? Plus this would mean a paradigm shift to more research and modeling as opposed to constant handicapping. Find what is winning and bet it, period. It took a while to get through my head last winter at Gulfstream. From 12/9 to 2/15, 71% of the turf routes were won by the top 2 in my turf rating. Still playing a Pick Em approach and not tracking % of entries the avg mutual was over $11 with weekly ROI's ranging between 56% to 77%. It was steady for that period and blew up completely in late February. I hadn't adequately capitalized but it was an eye opening lesson.

Fast forward to October 2016. Starting to profile Santa Anita for the BC. It didn't take long to see that my secondary turf rating(T2) that usually made it's presence felt on short turf courses was winning races at a big clip and it was practically the antithesis of the Del Mar turf course which I played lightly late summer. I started betting by 10/6. The model held all of the short meet. The T2 rating won 89% of the races but there were a lot of contenders. They represented 30% of the entries but won 2.97% of their fair share at a dead even mutual of 10.00. ROI was 55%. Lesson learned for good. This was a new method of play that had previously not existed. With high hit rates and ROI it represented virtues that were the antithesis of the perceived modern game. This wasn't aggressive and swinging for the fences. It was taking what was there.

The same thing happened about 5 years ago when I realized how many wins I was squandering playing purely exotics. I made a distinct split between bet approaches. And using a 3 unit method(3 units win on sub 4-1)(2 units win, 1 unit place on 4-1 up). I realized that this also was a thing in itself. A self contained method that could stand on it's own. But to me it was just another method.

A similar thing happened when I stopped tracking contenders by what I call the fun with numbers method(1st choice 2nd choice 3rd choice etc). If you had a 1st choice as the ONLY contender in a race a 3rd choice winning at long odds was meaningless. So I tracked contenders simply by AB(strong contenders) and C+(marginal contenders) and let over 1,000 races pile up to start making conclusions. Which shattered my illusions of excess value handicapping.(I covered this is an entirely other thread). What this ultimately laid the basis for was not only proper ticket structure for sequential bets but gauging the potential value in any race for exotics. Tracking the odds ranges kept me out of low expectation returns that also included many longshots.

Add in developing specific uses for certain bets and I had 5-6 approaches to making money at this game all with different hit rates and profit potentials. They all have added up to a more well rounded game but being as they are largely independent of each other even in the same races it wasn't geared toward lowering risk at all. In fact that it requires a higher level of investment it is quite the opposite.

In the last 18 months I've learned a lot and still have much more to utilize. Most of my conclusions and examples are relatively new and the future still has to play out. But I feel at least mentally I am playing a different game. The only thing I have made easier is formatting for pace figures while adding twice as much work! LOL!