Sidebar

[DeltaLover]

Trying to discover meaning in a word leads to a recursive procedure than never ends; words mean whatever we use them for so searching for the meaning of “handicapping” is not helpful or helpful as its contents are very subjective.

More than this, I think that if we assume that “horse handicapping” is the process of assigning every starter’s winning probability then the process of mimicking the crowd’s betting habits is a very accurate definition; it is well known and documented that it forms near to optimal betting markets assuming a large enough data sample.

Following an “abc” approach based on well known angles does not present any real value as it results to betting patterns that are very correlated to the public consensus and doing so will destroy any bankroll no matter how large it is.

My definition of handicapping lies in finding bets that contradict “abc” handicapping as it is expressed by classical and well known angles like those reflected in the conditions of the race for example. To be successful doing so, requires the elimination of races where the crowd has a large probability to be proved correct or the risk factor is too high and the race is very chaotic while concentrating on bets that look promising by certain factors that the crowd tends to routinely underestimate or not even been aware of them.

Of course the tricky part of this approach is that the public’s criteria are not static; instead they are changing albeit with a relatively slow rate that the “handicapper” (based on my definition) needs to be ahead of it.