Quote:
Originally Posted by thaskalos
I think the answer is obvious. Contrary to what some gullible people think, there are no "answers" that can be found in handicapping books. There are only questions and opinions about those questions. Books like Barry Meadow's allow those of us who don't use vast databases to figure out for ourselves how reliable our handicapping opinions really are.
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I think we all know books aren't the answer to instant success.
I already mentioned this, but even though I think these kinds of studies are hugely important to answering handicapping questions, they get tricky, at least for me.
I've found that even when I answer handicapping questions with large samples, sometimes the game changes. What was true in the past is no longer true. The most obvious example is layoffs and days between races. There are horses I bet horses now I would have been keying against 30 years ago. Training changed.
I've also found things that outperformed the take fairly significantly (both positive and negative) with fairly large samples covering multiple years that didn't stop working in terms of predicting outcomes, but the odds changed and they were no longer of any real betting value. Trainer patterns are the most obvious, but I've had others.
So even when we learn from these studies, we are sometimes on very thin ice because so much is changing.
