What an excellent post.
(I pushed your quote down simply because there was so much.)
From what you've posted it seems that you handicap, then you do a review of your day, trying to discern what you:
* Did well
* Could have improved
* Did Poorly
The fact that you are willing to put forth the effort to look objectively at your day says a lot about your desire to improve.
Imagine you are watching a stock market analyst on TV after the markets have closed.
They describe what happened on the day (i.e. "The Dow went up today because...").
We really have no idea whether the analyst's reason for the movement was right or wrong.
Was anything really learned by what the analyst said?
Unlike you, he does not post his selection BEFORE the day's events. If he did, you could track his selections and determine if his opinions are even worth listening to.
If he did post his selections ahead of time, you could accumulate some data and analyze that.
However, without an accumulation of data to study, learning is always very difficult.
While this is an over-simplification, it is what must be done.
If you really want to improve your game,
you need the answers to some very important questions. Here are some general examples.)
- "How well do your assessments perform over (say) a 100-race sample?"
- "How accurate are the base components that lead you to your decisions?"
- "Are those base components really important?"
There really are no shortcuts to this that I can see.
Hope this helps.
Dave
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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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