Quote:
Originally Posted by AutumnLotus
Thank you very much for taking the time to write out such a detailed response, truly I appreciate it and your suggestions will not go unnoticed.
Although I do want to say this, your suggestion of essentially assigning a percentage of probability between the three selections, essentially ranking them is a fine suggestion however one of the troubles that I have is doing exactly that; for the most part when I handicap a race and settle upon my three selections I honestly for the life of me cannot discern, or rather, I cannot see them as anything other than all three having the same chance of winning. I know that may come off as a bit odd or silly to say, but for the most part every time I attempt to assign a percentage of probability to separate them into rank and order I end up getting much too analytical, to the point where my line of confidence begins to muddy my decision making.
The problem I have is that I'll look at for example the first horse out of the 3 and I'll say something like this horse has the best speed figure by far, then I'll look at the second horse out of the three and I'll say something like but this worse has the best speed at distance today as well as the highest prime power number, then I'll look at the third horse and it'll be something like this horse today is being ridden by a high percentage winning jockey with a positive jockey and trainer combo.
I'm just throwing out super quick examples I'm sure you understand that I'm simply trying to say that I completely agree with your suggestion but I literally have a very hard time making solid decisions and assigning one has more value between the three in order to rank them appropriately.
Another very important point that I also want to make here is that At the end of the day I will always go back and look At the horses that have won and then I will look Over its past performance as well as my data to see if there is anything that stands out that I should have caught or that I know to look for next time and what I discover is that between the three selections the ones that I would think should have came in doesn't and the horse that did come in has Nothing of value that would suggest this horse over the other. I hope I am making sense. What I'm saying is when I go back and analyze what it is that made one horse out of my three come in for the win over the other two it seems to me that I would never have chose that horse to be the winner or to be the better of the other two.
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First off just because the public typically is able to latch on to a top choice in most races and they perform remarkably well does not mean that you or I as handicappers are capable of doing the same thing. Your job is to learn what works for you. You may handicap 20 races and have a strong, discernible opinion in just 3 of them. That is fine. I am going to suggest you focus on the races you have a good opinion on and write up a thorough analysis of the top contenders. At that point you can refer back to that analysis when you do your post race analysis. There are a lot of races that I cannot find much or even any separation between my top contenders.
You mentioned the prime power rating. Since you seem far more comfortable with 3 top contenders, use that as your ranking. Use the type of database analysis I mentioned above and see what your roi is based on the prime power ratings. See if you can find anything that indicates over a fairly large sample that you can reach a roi loss of under 10 percent. From there you can try to build. If everything over the course of time points to a 15 percent to 25 percent roi loss, then you are not going anywhere.
One last note. Track your exacta roi on the 6 possibilities (1-2, 1-3, 2-1…..). At this point I would say you are at the data accumulation point. You are trying to learn if you have or can develop the tools to approach profitability. Keep your betting very small until you get to the point that you are confident that what you are doing is working.
