Which authors molded your handicapping?

[green80]

Pittsburg Phil

[atlasaxis]

Ray Taulbot, Dick Mitchell

[riskman]

Pine,Mitchell and Bradshaw.

[HKHandicapper]

Don Scott

[classhandicapper]

Originally Posted by atlasaxis

Ray Taulbot, Dick Mitchell

I still think Ray Taulbot is wildly underrated.

Some of pace/final time charts weren't as sophisticated as today's and I was never a big fan of his "angle" approach. I think the latter may have even diminished his reputation, but he had a lot of very good pace insights long before pace handicapping became popular and I think he understood the overlap between pace/final time and class.

[cato]

Ainsleee, for opening my eyes to handicapping
Beyer, for going deeper (Picking Winners)
Mitchell, for the math and analysis
Cramer, for the kinky side and for his great writing
Pizzolla, to wrap it all up with candor and honesty
The good folks on this Pace Advantage Forum, for keeping it going...

All the best, Frank

[cj]

Originally Posted by cato

Ainsleee, for opening my eyes to handicapping
Beyer, for going deeper (Picking Winners)
Mitchell, for the math and analysis
Cramer, for the kinky side and for his great writing
Pizzolla, to wrap it all up with candor and honesty
The good folks on this Pace Advantage Forum, for keeping it going...

All the best, Frank

Good to see you post Frank, been a while!

[cato]

Thanks! I've actually written a lot of potential posts - just never actually posted them!

[JustRalph]

Beyer

JimG
Tom
CJ and his Dad
PA
Dave
Speed Figure
Jeff P
BillW
Ted Craven and his mom
Nathan from Equisim
Andy (TLG)

Lots of guys from the HTR board where I lurked

I’m sure I missed some great guys who helped me out almost 20 years ago. Many of these guys sent me docs-audio tapes and more.

I was an ok capper on dirt at first but was downright terrible on turf for a long time. After joining this board and getting tons of help for turf races from those guys listed above…..I got to be pretty good on turf.

When the game was good…..this board was full of great stuff….all you had to do was just ask. Writing posts here I think qualifies as an “author”

[Robert Fischer]

read Crist's "Exotic Betting" helped more in inspiration than it did in comprehension.

Also read some articles Mark Patterson sent me when I had a small house in Charleroi, Pa. I think he had written them for a racing magazine or two. It was such a good feeling and inspiration to receive free help from a someone I both respected on P.A. and was on the the broadcast for Mountaineer.

I am an OCD nerd (now a highly flawed one) but those may be the only authors I've read explicitly.

Everything else I gleaned from trial-n-error, from reading everything of interest on P.A. ,
a poster known as "The Fatman" or "Setup" mentored me for a while.
building my own belief system then using search engines and the internet to go to the sources of various components of my belief systems.
e.g. financial wisdom = read munger
market forces = michael porter
worldly wisdom = baltasar gracian
etc... etc...
and a ton of demanding an understanding of how the parimutuel system works, how the power concentration can change incentives, pretty much anything I could learn.

my library itself is embarrassingly small if limited to books

[omar2]

This “old timer” in his 80’s came up to me back in 1978 while I was at the track and he says to me that the only consistent thing in racing is the Tote Board. He then walks away, never saw him no more. I picked up his baton and studied the exactas and doubles for 2 years never even looked at the racing form. Did quite well. Before that I only looked at and tried to figure out the horses form using raw times and previous odds the horse ran at in the past. Self taught myself you can say. It wasn’t until 1983 when I met a guy named Fred Hahn who introduced me to Sartin’s and Mitchell’s works, Pizzolla and Taulbot also. He showed me par time ratings and computers and I showed him what knew about form and odds. This guy was a math genius and I was a math moron. It took me 2 months before I realized that 112=100 on a par time chart was an arbitrary number. And 27 years later up until his untimely death, horse racing is what friendship is all about. Today, being laid up in a nursing home, I reverted back to my board reading analysis abilities and still hitting them high priced horses. Thank god my long term memory is still intact.
Oh by the way I did feel that I wrote the definitive book on handicapping maidens using the tote board, so guess I can include myself also.
Omar

[crestridge]

The first inspiration as a young man was entering into the milieu of Secretariat, watching that last race at Belmont. Then a little later I met this patient of mine name George Thacker, who claimed to make his living at the track, supporting a wife and 11 children. I thought, wow, I'll look into this!!

He was, really, a con artist...but it did stimulate looking into many different "systems" offered, which never amounted to anything. Then "stumbled" upon Sartin, some kinda way, and found something that actually had "teeth" to the problem of analyzing this complex horse puzzle.

From almost all the authors mentioned in this forum, I've looked at some way, and many software systems.

It does seem, in the end, to develop one's "own" perspective on this puzzle that works best. Of course using all this information gathered by these different respectable authors.