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Old 10-11-2020, 12:40 PM   #61
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Let's face it, even if you have an edge on this game, the amount time, work, and dedication involved in keeping it typically makes it a bad use of time unless you love the sport and challenge of trying to show a profit at the end of the year. To make any significant money you need the bankroll and psychological makeup to put large sums of money through the windows and deal with the ups, downs, and stresses of that long term. Not everyone is wired for all that. It's easier to write a book, sell information, or get paid to give away your picks and insights.
Right on the money as usual.
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Old 10-11-2020, 02:55 PM   #62
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Originally Posted by classhandicapper View Post


Let's face it, even if you have an edge on this game, the amount time, work, and dedication involved in keeping it typically makes it a bad use of time unless you love the sport and challenge of trying to show a profit at the end of the year. To make any significant money you need the bankroll and psychological makeup to put large sums of money through the windows and deal with the ups, downs, and stresses of that long term. Not everyone is wired for all that. It's easier to write a book, sell information, or get paid to give away your picks and insights.


No matter how good the horseplayer is, his income remains very irregular and inconsistent...and this can fray the nerves of all but the most stoic players. I applaud those who leverage their gambling knowledge into a steady income. It's hard to overrate a regular paycheck.
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Old 10-11-2020, 04:19 PM   #63
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I previously posted the results of my "automated" race flow metrics covering multiple years that showed flat bet profits on strong upgrades and severe underperformance on strong downgrades. I did that because the metrics are sufficiently complex and took so long to develop, I wasn't giving much away.

I've since developed some automated bias metrics that look very promising.

But it's a lot to ask people to give away insights and angles that can help produce profits and potentially destroy their own value by making them common knowledge. It's too damn hard to find anything worth anything in this game to just give it away if it's working.

These inefficiencies often don't last.

I once had a "place" inefficiency that was like a gravy train for a few years (and people laughed at me because I was betting to place) when NYRA had a 14% take on WPS (now higher), I was getting a 7% rebate (now lower), and they hadn't switched to "net pool pricing" for place and show playoffs yet (which hurt the edge a few percent). All those negatives plus more computer betting and that edge is long gone.
Forget common knowledge, all it take is one betting team to latch onto the info and value is gone forever or as long as they are in business.
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Old 10-11-2020, 08:27 PM   #64
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I'm not giving anything away that I KNOW is an edge. I was a losing player from 14-35 years of age. No immediate plans of giving "my stuff" away.
What about the rest of us? We got a right to earn.
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Old 10-12-2020, 03:35 PM   #65
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Forget common knowledge, all it take is one betting team to latch onto the info and value is gone forever or as long as they are in business.
There are definitely teams putting in the work, and some of the time they are all over certain angles where you may have appeared to find value in the morning line.
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Old 10-17-2020, 03:58 AM   #66
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Does Hong Kong pps have running lines? Give us an idea of how the past performances look.
Have a look at WWW.HKRACING.COM. They have PDFs and a web version.
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Old 10-17-2020, 04:01 AM   #67
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Been listening to The Perfect Bet on Audibel. It was interesting that the author said Bill Benter the Hong Kong horse racing expert found that betting overlays lost him money until he adjusted to a number between his model and the tote board.

Also that only a population of about a thousand horses raced between the two Hong Kong tracks and shippers are rare. Seems like a database could easily be maintained. Maybe that's why he could use a model vs handicapping with tried and true elements of handicapping.

All thru the book the author refers to top contestants in racing and sports as predictions. I don't see handicapping as making predictions but evaluations where price is the determining factor.

Great book though.
To your first point ... Benter found that there was an extreme bias between his strongest overlays and the outcome of the race, i.e. his horse nearly always lost!

In the end, Benter did the common sense thing ... he combined his own odds with the public's in another multinomial logit model, and used the odds from that model to base his betting on.
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Old 10-17-2020, 01:43 PM   #68
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To your first point ... Benter found that there was an extreme bias between his strongest overlays and the outcome of the race, i.e. his horse nearly always lost!

In the end, Benter did the common sense thing ... he combined his own odds with the public's in another multinomial logit model, and used the odds from that model to base his betting on.
Dick Mitchell said the same thing - that his underlays outperformed his overlays.

I've also found that in the entire make-a-line-and-bet-into-the-tote process.

Benter made it work by... well, making it work. LOL

People from inside his former team, have told me that he started with a high weight for the public's opinion and, over time, was able to lower that weight substantially.

This approach, what I call, "smoothing," has fallen into disuse as the final tote odds have moved towards higher efficiency relative to gate odds.

The whales make it work by PREDICTING what those final odds will actually be. This naturally adds a new factor: "Who/How will the "really smart" money actually wager?"

My goal for the last 18 months or so has been to answer the question: "WHO WILL BE BET DOWN?"

IMHO, that is a game changer for the small handicapper. It is the great equalizer.
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Old 10-19-2020, 07:23 PM   #69
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When you say "bet down" - bet down from what - the morning line?
From gate loading to final odds?

What if you your models odds-line rankings mirror the public? Your fav wins same % as public, 2nd fav same % as public etc. Any ideas on how this could be useful?
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Old 10-19-2020, 09:05 PM   #70
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When you say "bet down" - bet down from what - the morning line?
From gate loading to final odds?

What if you your models odds-line rankings mirror the public? Your fav wins same % as public, 2nd fav same % as public etc. Any ideas on how this could be useful?
From gate loading to final odds?

Yes. First horse loads the gate.

What if you your models odds-line rankings mirror the public? Your fav wins same % as public, 2nd fav same % as public etc.

Those are, of course, two separate targets.

Since the goal is to outperform, I don't see how this would achieve that. However, know with a high confidence level what the odds would ultimately look like would solved half the problem: "What will the odds be?"

Would still leave you with "What are the horses probabilities?"


Instead, I've taken a different direction.
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Old 10-19-2020, 10:01 PM   #71
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When you say "bet down" - bet down from what - the morning line?
From gate loading to final odds?

What if you your models odds-line rankings mirror the public? Your fav wins same % as public, 2nd fav same % as public etc. Any ideas on how this could be useful?
Thinking out loud here. So Wm. Scott tried using the top three choices only, because at that time, the top three in the wagering won ~67% of the time, and placed 90% of the time. Only one of his problems was that the top three at 3 MTP, 2 MTP, Post time, aren't always the top three in the ACTUAL betting. Today, it's probably closer to 69% to 70% by the top three betting odds.

How could that be useful, you ask? I tried Scott's idea, what was it, 35 years ago? and in 10 races you could not determine the top three consistently in maybe 3 or 4 races out of 10. Sometimes it was only 2, sometimes it was 5 out of 10.
So if we could focus our selection efforts on only the top three by pp's, money-flow, or whatever you choose, would that not get us closer to an even playing field? If you only focus your selection efforts to three choices, wouldn't our batting average improve? ROI, not sure?

So back to your question, If we could model an odds line that mirrors the final public odds, reliably, wouldn't selecting a winner or an ABC group for horizontals be improved? Not sure.
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Old 10-20-2020, 12:39 AM   #72
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So back to your question, If we could model an odds line that mirrors the final public odds, reliably, wouldn't selecting a winner or an ABC group for horizontals be improved? Not sure.
Let me think about it a while longer.

Nope. Same answer as last time. ;-)

First, William Scott's stuff simply never worked. In fact, it kind of worked better in reverse! (i.e. toss the plays and pick from the other 2). Doesn't really matter because that was the Stone Age compared to today.

Today the top 3 win 74%.

There is something special about that number but it is not what you'd imagine.


Since you asked...

In 2018 I found it so hard to win that I reinvented everything. Just when I got it working, got even and winner for the year so I could actually withdraw money, winter was upon us.

In early 2019 everything changed again.

That time, I decided to do something I'd never done before. That's when I really started trying to do the reverse of what everyone else was doing. Pretty much literally.

I'd always done some form of pace handicapping; building models (automatically in HSH) but without ever selecting a paceline. Haven't done that in maybe 20 years.

So, what I did was turn the tables. I used the pace handicapping to set the odds and bet into those odds with "how the public bets."

BTW, the biggest difference between those 2 approaches is that one (the pace) is what the public does and the other (projected tote) reflects what the whales do.

IOW, I wanted to EMULATE the whales betting into the HANDICAPPING.

(For those of you who chalk this up as the ravings of a lunatic, it worked.)

(Emphasis on the past tense was intentional.)
As I always do, I went public with this to my users in our annual seminar. (Not free, but very reasonable, cost considering all the work I put into it.)

For those who believe that nobody would sell anything that works... well, get this... It is how I have made my living for the past 30 years. I build stuff that works and find a way to get paid for it.
Then, winter 2019 came. As has been the case for a number of years, many of the systems go dormant from just before Thanksgiving to about the last week in January.
My belief is that trainer patterns change because the big boys simply take the holiday season off and let their assistants do most of the work. They also rest their horses.

They go back to work seriously just after New Years but it takes 3 weeks or so for things to get back to normal.

Trivia: Field sizes are actually larger in the winter and speed ratings do a better job of pushing winners to the top ranks. I wouldn't have bet on either of these being true if I'd not run the tests myself.
Just as The System was coming back (late Jan thru early March, 2020) Covid-19 shut everything down. What stayed running just made no sense!
The strategies were scenario-based. Those strategies were based upon the number of horses projected to be in the "1st tier" of the tote board projections. (Remember the tote projection was based upon the pace handicapping.)

Most of the strategies were literally reversed! Some scenarios called for betting overlay(s) and others called for underlay(s). A couple led to chaos races where we just bet the longest odds horses.

I've spent the last several months working all of this out. Started winning again in July, but it was still hit or miss.

I think I've got it dialed in now, but we'll see for sure in February. Meanwhile, no seminar for the guys this year. However, I am recording the current system that really seems to be working. It will be released to the guys who purchased last year's seminar as a free upgrade this week.

Got a little long-winded. It seems to be my nature. LOL
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Old 10-20-2020, 09:09 AM   #73
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I understand that the final odds are fairly efficient and that the collective mind of all horse players (which includes sophisticated computer models, better informed insiders, and a lot of very smart individuals) is probably going to outperform the odds line any individual can make.

That said, this game is still about finding things that are NOT being reflected on the board.

Two of the most important scores of my life came a few decades ago when I knew about 50% of what I know now. The thing is, the one thing I did know was that trainer "x" didn't try with first time starters. However, 2nd time out, especially if he added blinkers, the horse would often make a huge jump up and win at a big price.

I wasn't building odds lines, watching money flows, or anything else. I had a piece of information that I was close to 100% sure wasn't being reflected on the odds board. The handful of bombs I caught on the biggest bets of my life up to that point FAR OUSTRIPPED the losses on everything else I was playing at that time.

I'm not sure that trainer patterns like that exist anymore with all the databases and Formulator screening tools that exist now, but I think the key for the average guy like me is not in greater complexity building odds lines. It's in finding those rare situations where you are almost certain the public and money flows are wrong.
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Old 10-20-2020, 09:19 AM   #74
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one of my excel files contain 298 races
going onto the gate these are the number of winners for the top 3
1st wins 29%
2nd 20%
3rd 17%

overall, top three won 66% of the time which seems to conform to previous reported sums.

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Old 10-20-2020, 09:39 AM   #75
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one of my excel files contain 298 races
going onto the gate these are the number of winners for the top 3
1st wins 29%
2nd 20%
3rd 17%

overall, top three won 66% of the time which seems to conform to previous reported sums.

i'll add the place numbers

1st place 19%
2nd place 18%
3rd place 13%
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