What would you do?

[Lefty]

Shh, don't tell everyone but those TPR figs still work.

[Dick Schmidt]

I did help develop a method that works and that I used to make a living for over 7 years. Soon after we developed it, we put it in a book and flogged it all over for 30 bucks. Sold a lot of them but didn't see much change in the prices. The reason is that it takes quite a bit of work, and most handicappers are lazy.

If I had a true "black box" that just printed out the name of the horse that would win, and it was right enough to show a profit, of course I would keep it under wraps. When I developed a method (TPR) that needs several hours a day keeping records then I'm willing to shout it from the rooftops. So far my confidence in the inability of most handicappers to engage in any sort of sustained effort has proved accurate.

Dick

If someone with multiple personalities threatens to kill himself, is it considered a hostage situation?

[Overlay]

The only (hypothetical) conditions under which I could see that there would be no concerns about how widely a program (or written method) was disseminated would be if it could be used not just for isolating the most likely winner, but for predicting the actual winning chances of horses (preferably each horse in a field) in a manner that was both completely accurate AND completely insensitive to actual post-time odds. Otherwise, there would always be some effect on odds/profitability from the word getting out.

[Richard]

I personally would not be concerned about letting everyone know about a good program because I've already done so(AIOv6).The reason is because you still have to do the handicapping work(track profiles,betting records,etc.).Such being the case,I find no shortage of people who are definitely tip sheet oriented.

[windstone]

i don't think anyone should be not willing to share the program they use. i do use one. i am a rec player but have hit my share of very good payoffs on exactas and tri's. i think maybe, like myself, no one that uses one of these programs takes it at face value without masaging it in one way or another to their particular style of capping. just a rec players opinion.

[JustRalph]

Originally Posted by Dick Schmidt

I did help develop a method that works and that I used to make a living for over 7 years. Soon after we developed it, we put it in a book and flogged it all over for 30 bucks. Sold a lot of them but didn't see much change in the prices. The reason is that it takes quite a bit of work, and most handicappers are lazy.

If I had a true "black box" that just printed out the name of the horse that would win, and it was right enough to show a profit, of course I would keep it under wraps. When I developed a method (TPR) that needs several hours a day keeping records then I'm willing to shout it from the rooftops. So far my confidence in the inability of most handicappers to engage in any sort of sustained effort has proved accurate.

Dick

If someone with multiple personalities threatens to kill himself, is it considered a hostage situation?

Fine, Fine Post....................

[BCOURTNEY]

This is an interesting question. In order for a commerical product to be successful, it has to have a good racing model and produce a fairly accurate estimate of a horse's actual value in terms of odds, it must predict how the public will place odds on a horse ahead of time, unless you want to be jamming on a calculator at post time, assess the risk of the investment and the expected return, wager an appropriate amount of the available bankroll to acheive a target return, and guarantee that the player has enough disipline to follow all of this and make refinements to the modeling and bankroll managment software as needed. The successful handicappers focus on risk aversion and managing the bankroll. You could give away a "system" that picked 99% winners, and 99% of people would screw it up mostly due to the fact that people are not objective with the appropriate amount to wager on any given play, even when a person does find value they have a hard time assessing its actual worth. Subsequently, they invest an inappropriate amount of money and give themselves non optimal returns by wagering to much or to little, as such the players making the most optimal bets in each race profit the most. It has been shown over time those that employ the most optimal growth strategies in a market eventually control it (get all the profits) and perhaps even those making the *best plays*, but sub-optimal wagers go broke. This is the classic winning all the battles and losing the war syndrome, it happens on wall street every day.

So in a nut shell. Publish it, give it away, in fact if its shown to be successful even "sometimes" I would give it away for free and hope alot of people use it _knowing_ that they will use it incorrectly, double up when they shouldn't (yee-haw), half when they shouldn't and I would go laughing to the cleaners, using the same strategy with optimized wagering amounts.

In fact what's interesting there are some disturbances in some pools all over the country by people using automated wagering systems, they all carry a few charactertistics in common, and they are causing some disturbances in certain odds ranges in certain pools. If you can identify these you already have a winner.