How to make money in horse racing

[AndyC]

Originally Posted by Triopstor

1. Someone told me that the favourites of the 1970's usually paid 4-1
odds. I'm curious if that's true. I wonder how far a $2.00 ticket
in the 1950's got the handicappers of that age.

2. Doctor Sartin changed the horse racing world..........

I don't believe either of the above is remotely true.

[Dave Schwartz]

Originally Posted by AndyC

I don't believe either of the above is remotely true.

#2 is true to a great degree.
Howard Sartin did change the racing world.

So did Tod Sloan.

Neither has much to do with being profitable in this age.

[thaskalos]

Tom Ainslie changed the horse racing world too. But that’s only useful to the “historians” of the game.

[Jeff P]

Bill Benter and Alan Woods changed the racing world.

But that's just me.


-jp
.

[Dave Schwartz]

Originally Posted by thaskalos

Tom Ainslie changed the horse racing world too. But that’s only useful to the “historians” of the game.

Exactly!


The game is ever-evolving... until it ends.
... which could be soon if steps aren't taken.
(But I digress, as that is way above my pay grade.)

But the game HAS evolved.

And there are potential answers to make oneself competitive.

However, it is not keep doing what we've been doing for decades.

[AndyC]

Originally Posted by Dave Schwartz

#2 is true to a great degree.
Howard Sartin did change the racing world.

So did Tod Sloan.

Neither has much to do with being profitable in this age.

Sartin changed the racing world in what way? Did he discover or bring something new that was never done before? And if so, at what scale?


A person who did change the racing world was Len Ragozin.

[Jeff P]

Originally Posted by MJC922

Adding on to that warning from some of my own experiences, I would strongly recommend the OP split a large sample before anything is tested whatsoever. People need to understand that when someone asks the computer, show me all of the combinations of factors which make money over a sample, what is being returned in that subset is honestly nothing more than a series of backfits. It can be a really large sample too, sadly that doesn't matter because there's a ton of noise in payoffs even in large samples.

So we have these combinations with promise in hand. From there those combinations of factors need to be validated on another sample altogether, a clean pristine never tested sample. At this point when 19 out of 20 of those go negative, now we're finally getting somewhere, and frankly I would go ahead and use the newer more recent split for the initial queries and then do the validation on the older sample. The benefit to that is it puts to rest these folks who think large samples go negative afterward because people (whales, the easter bunny etc) are adjusting and taking away all the value that was there. Well if you do it in reverse that puts that myth to rest.

Now what's remaining, that 1 out of 20 that survived trial by fire has good promise, but even then we have to keep in the back of our minds it's not impossible with enough positive ROIs in the first sample that some of these subsets will no doubt be positive due to noise in the payoffs of the second sample too. A combination which 'accidentally' beats two samples is inevitable with enough positive ROIs to retest.

So IMO it's good to do research obviously, WPS% etc it's all worthwhile but taking ROIs by the horns are a serious challenge.

Imo, this post is spot on.

It's really easy to backfit.

For at least the past 10 years I've been assigning a random number to every record in the database. (My way of removing cognitive bias from the process of creating holdout samples.)

After validation on randomly generated holdout samples I'm also a big believer in applying the scientific method to the following hypothesis:

Q. Does what I created perform well on fresh races going forward in time after I created it?

Imo, that's the acid test.


-jp

.

[Robert Fischer]

Rather than always throwing factors at a database, I think it would be cool to automate a strong player's models.

[lefty359]

If Doc Sartin didn't change the racing world he sure had a lot of copycats that thought he did

[thaskalos]

Originally Posted by AndyC

Sartin changed the racing world in what way? Did he discover or bring something new that was never done before? And if so, at what scale?


A person who did change the racing world was Len Ragozin.

I don't think you need to discover or bring something "new" in order to change the different facets of our world. All you have to do is take some "esoteric" knowledge that was once hidden, package it in an attractive way, and bring it down to the masses.

Edward Thorp didn't invent card counting...but he certainly changed the blackjack world by making that practice widely known. And Andy Beyer didn't invent speed figures, but he brought the figures to the masses...and he became immortal.

[AndyC]

Originally Posted by thaskalos

I don't think you need to discover or bring something "new" in order to change the different facets of our world. All you have to do is take some "esoteric" knowledge that was once hidden, package it in an attractive way, and bring it down to the masses.

Edward Thorp didn't invent card counting...but he certainly changed the blackjack world by making that practice widely known. And Andy Beyer didn't invent speed figures, but he brought the figures to the masses...and he became immortal.

Did Sartin bring anything to the masses? In my experience with the Sartin methodology I didn't find that there was a massive following.

[Speed Figure]

If there wasn’t a mass following pace and cap wouldn’t exist! It's pretty clear that once you go Sartin you don’t go back!

[headhawg]

Originally Posted by AndyC

A person who did change the racing world was Len Ragozin.

Originally Posted by AndyC

Did Sartin bring anything to the masses? In my experience with the Sartin methodology I didn't find that there was a massive following.

And Ragozin has a massive following?? Ask any knowledgeable horseplayer who had more influence.

[thaskalos]

Originally Posted by AndyC

Did Sartin bring anything to the masses? In my experience with the Sartin methodology I didn't find that there was a massive following.

In the grand scheme of things…does horse racing itself have a “massive following”? Whether massive or not, there is a following, and that following represents a small corner of our world. And Sartin influenced enough people to qualify being called someone who changed this small corner of our world, IMO.

[Dave Schwartz]

Originally Posted by AndyC

Did Sartin bring anything to the masses? In my experience with the Sartin methodology I didn't find that there was a massive following.

He absolutely did bring something to the masses.
I can tell you it was his concepts that made me a winning player for the first time.


There was quite a large following. I recall going to my first seminar and there were 350 people.

Dick Schmidt told me what the readership was for the newsletter and the number was extremely large.


I recently made a post in one thread about Howard Sartin and explained quite a bit.

IMHO, he was a Giant of Racing, to be included with the likes of Beyer, Quirin, Ragozin, and a handful more.

Your mileage may differ.