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Old 01-14-2019, 11:40 PM   #46
Dave Schwartz
 
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Dave,

Do you think that it is the same whales year after year that are getting sharper or are new and better whales beating the former winners into losses?
Same Big 6. Of course, new ones can come up.

Thaskalos said something interesting:
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I can't wait to see a live demonstration of these "hi-tech" tools at work in the handicapping of an actual race. And, until I see such a demonstration...I am forced to believe that "winning" is just as elusive among the 'hi-tech' handicappers as it is among the "traditionalists".
That is absolutely accurate. I know of 3 different groups who invested a lot of money and manpower in the effort without anything to show for it in the end.

One of those groups was in almost $400k before they made their first bet and eventually quit at around -$600k.

I even know of one group who won large money for two years and then made changes and went south in year three. (Admittedly, this group had too many chiefs and not enough Indians.)


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I feel certain that if I had a team of people with advanced degrees in probability, statistics, and AI using a large database of information and a team of experienced horse players inputting trip notes and other subjective information, I'd be able to make much better odds lines than I do now on my own.

The real question for me is whether after 4 decades of studying this game and ever increasing knowledge is the game passing me by because other people with better math and computer skills are pooling their talents and using machines that allow them to move at a much faster rate.
Also very astute.

I am not directing this statement at you, but I seriously question that most horseplayers who have "studied" for decades have really studied at all. My experience is that most have "played" and made anecdotal observations as opposed to anything that resembled studying.

I think your first comment - about assembling a team - is also spot on. However, such a team costs a massive amount of money. MASSIVE.

I recall when my former playing partner and I were looking for someone with true "Quant" credentials. I interview 26 different PhDs. After #26, I simply gave up.

He was a professor emeritus who had just retired and was looking for consulting work. I explained what we were looking for - simply, how to develop "accurate" probabilities from what we had. He said he'd get back to me.

Three days later he called with such excitement, announcing that he had found IT! I hurried over to his house where he handed me the original paper on the Kelly Criterion.

I explained to him that this was, to any learned horseplayer, literally grade school-level work.

BTW, during the search, I did find 2 who probably had the skill level needed. Each of them demanded over $25,000 per month and a significant piece of the action.

Finally...
The point of my last post was that we - the horseplayers of today - can still win. We just need to be more creative about how we handicap.

While there are probably some artful handicappers who have beaten the game for decades or more, and are still winning today, my belief is that the level of skill necessary to win with "art" is somewhere along the lines of a Da Vinci or Picasso.

The make-an-oddsline-and-bet-into-the-tote is simply dead. The tote is a moving target.

So, how do we win?

Well, we must do something different for starters. But that isn't the end of it. Somebody has to do serious studying to figure it out.

Waking up on a Monday morning and deciding that you're going to have it figured out by the following weekend is just completely without merit. Same with thinking that running through about 40 races will provide a meaningful answer.

But I firmly believe it can still be done, even by a PPC player. (i.e. pencil, paper, calculator)
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Old 01-14-2019, 11:42 PM   #47
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It is impossible to do ‘physicality’ at the simos...you simply must be at the track to do that with any degree of confidence...
Not true. While in the paddock you have a great deal more visual info to go by, at the Simo you can be very picky and grind a profit. Patience is required.

Someone here in the recent past year posted a link to a woman that won some national handicapping Tournament, she walked thru a Churchill race by viewing a monitor and making her choices. Pretty good stuff. Certainly can be done if you know what you're doing.
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Old 01-14-2019, 11:54 PM   #48
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I wonder how many of us over the years have had that ‘ah hah’ feeling...thinking we were on the verge of ‘getting it right’ THIS TIME AROUND...

Right now, I’m at that point again, having made several good scores that basically kept me EVEN...! But THIS TIME AROUND I’m REALLY optimistic...! I mean lately, I’ve really spent a whole lot of my waking hours consumed in all this racing phantasmagorical paraphernalia...replay, charts, forms, touts, wager structure...it is basically all I think about, and really all that interests me...but no, I’m not obsessed, or anything...

My relatives wonder about me and ask “Is that ALL HE DOES...?”
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Old 01-14-2019, 11:58 PM   #49
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Not true. While in the paddock you have a great deal more visual info to go by, at the Simo you can be very picky and grind a profit. Patience is required.

Someone here in the recent past year posted a link to a woman that won some national handicapping Tournament, she walked thru a Churchill race by viewing a monitor and making her choices. Pretty good stuff. Certainly can be done if you know what you're doing.
Like I have said many times, most of what tv coverage of daily paddock and post parade is “the hind end shot of a horse moving away from the cameras”....the coverage is abysmal....I know, I spend plenty of time attempting to gain some decent insight that way...
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Old 01-15-2019, 01:06 AM   #50
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I suspect the so-called whale teams probably do not venture out of the top 3 m/l choices due to the amount of money at risk.
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Old 01-15-2019, 01:11 AM   #51
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In my experience there are not nearly as many mid range price overlays as there used to be.
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Old 01-15-2019, 02:20 AM   #52
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Like I have said many times, most of what tv coverage of daily paddock and post parade is “the hind end shot of a horse moving away from the cameras”....the coverage is abysmal....I know, I spend plenty of time attempting to gain some decent insight that way...
Again, not true. Maybe someone here remembers the lady's name and can post that video. She states CD has great shots of horses and they do.

LaDowns, Belmont, Saratoga, GP, and to a lesser extent, Tampa all give good enough camera work to where you can find maybe one standout horse per card. Golden Gate as well, but by the time they're mid card I'm headed home or to chess classes.
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Old 01-15-2019, 03:01 AM   #53
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I am not directing this statement at you, but I seriously question that most horseplayers who have "studied" for decades have really studied at all. My experience is that most have "played" and made anecdotal observations as opposed to anything that resembled studying.
Whether we are talking about sports, or about gambling...just "playing" a game is nothing like engaging in the sort of diligent practice that it takes to improve and eventually become an "expert" in the endeavor. When I hear a horseplayer say that he has "30 years experience in the game"...I just smile and wonder if he realizes that he probably only has 3 months-worth of experience...repeated 120 times.
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Old 01-15-2019, 04:21 AM   #54
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While there are probably some artful handicappers who have beaten the game for decades or more, and are still winning today, my belief is that the level of skill necessary to win with "art" is somewhere along the lines of a Da Vinci or Picasso.

The make-an-oddsline-and-bet-into-the-tote is simply dead. The tote is a moving target.

So, how do we win?

Well, we must do something different for starters. But that isn't the end of it. Somebody has to do serious studying to figure it out.

Waking up on a Monday morning and deciding that you're going to have it figured out by the following weekend is just completely without merit. Same with thinking that running through about 40 races will provide a meaningful answer.

But I firmly believe it can still be done, even by a PPC player. (i.e. pencil, paper, calculator)
When online poker was in full swing in this country, I kept hearing about how lucky the young poker players were to be coming up during the online poker era...because they could play hundreds of hands an hour while the "live" poker player had been severely limited in that regard. The online poker player could accumulate a "decade's worth of poker experience in a mere 6 months", the saying went...and it was true. But...what sort of "experience" would that be? Would the online players be able to concentrate on those hundreds of hands an hour with the same focus that the studious live poker players had been plying their trade up 'til that time? Could quantity ever trump QUALITY...when serious money is at stake?

I think the same thing has happened with horse racing now that full-card simulcasting has merged with computer handicapping software, and databases. Today's horseplayer has access to more races in a day than the horseplayers of old had in a week...and the "hi-tech" handicapping tools give the impression that such a monumental task could be manageable even for the part-time player...because the computer software does all the grunt work. And quality again suffers at the hands of quantity.

I think progress is a beautiful thing...and I have tried to embrace it myself, as much as my mental capacity will allow. But I also think that the handicapping technology that we now hold in our hands must be recognized as the "tool" that it really is...and that the real "skill" is the property of the craftsman, and not of the tool that he happens to wield. As the computer software mines the past performances looking for clues, the handicapper must perform his due diligence too...because the most important clues are often found BETWEEN the lines.
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Old 01-15-2019, 09:20 AM   #55
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Not true. While in the paddock you have a great deal more visual info to go by, at the Simo you can be very picky and grind a profit. Patience is required.

Someone here in the recent past year posted a link to a woman that won some national handicapping Tournament, she walked thru a Churchill race by viewing a monitor and making her choices. Pretty good stuff. Certainly can be done if you know what you're doing.

So here is an idea (probably NOT original):

Feed Video of Post Parade (or more paddock activity) along with all our data and results of the races into our Black Boxes (you know Neural Networks, Genetic Algorithms, etc.) and see how our AI performs and what inputs are value significant. In this way, we 'quantify' visual info without the distortion of human judgment. Of course, that would mean we would need to have this video for thousands of races.
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Old 01-15-2019, 09:59 AM   #56
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So here is an idea (probably NOT original):

Feed Video of Post Parade (or more paddock activity) along with all our data and results of the races into our Black Boxes (you know Neural Networks, Genetic Algorithms, etc.) and see how our AI performs and what inputs are value significant. In this way, we 'quantify' visual info without the distortion of human judgment. Of course, that would mean we would need to have this video for thousands of races.
On those same lines...

What if we were to build our own HI (Human intelligence) model. We would with everyone identifying the top 5 factors they would want included. If 20 people participated, we could have 100 factors (assuming no repeats).

Once we have those factors, each individual could take 5 of them and research the top 50 or so horses in each category for 2018....resources could be shared with one-another on where to find certain data.

When all said and done, we would have a model with 100 categories and the top 50 horses from each category. A ranking system could now be put in place to give each horse a value. We could then take the top 50 overall horses and enter them into a virtual stable so we know when theyre running.

The only problem would be updating data.

No individual race handicapping needed really..if horse X is running today then i dont care who hes running against becuse hes ranked on our model and the others are not.
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Old 01-15-2019, 10:45 AM   #57
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On second thought...IDK if theres 100 factors that can be quantified. If there is, how many of them can be researched to find a top 50?
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Old 01-15-2019, 10:46 AM   #58
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I am not directing this statement at you, but I seriously question that most horseplayers who have "studied" for decades have really studied at all. My experience is that most have "played" and made anecdotal observations as opposed to anything that resembled studying.
I agree with this 100%.

For much of my 40 years of playing I learned by reading books, trial and error experience, and keeping track of my bets to see where I was doing well or poorly. My only serious study was a small database in the late 80s and trainer stats I kept manually for awhile. There's nothing wrong with that. You do learn by trial and error and from the experience of others. It's just a very tedious and long process. Now that I have a more comprehensive database, it's way easier to test ideas and verify insights. You pick up quickly on where conventional wisdom is wrong or where your own ideas are good or bad.
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Old 01-15-2019, 11:28 AM   #59
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The make-an-oddsline-and-bet-into-the-tote is simply dead. The tote is a moving target.
I am still making odds lines and betting overlays with success (happily for both of us since I have bought your data for at least a dozen years).

I can see a difference in the plays available. They are fewer for me and much more slanted towards high priced horses. I don't know if the whales are reluctant to bet the hoses with little other money in the pool or if they will take away that value in time.

With high odds plays the losing streaks are longer and since I see things evolving I can have no certainty that good results will return until they do.

If it is true that whales are operating on slim after rebate margins and the competitive landscape is changing, I would think it would be very difficult for them to distinguish a short term streak from a change that would dictate significant adjustments or retreat.
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Old 01-15-2019, 11:56 AM   #60
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As long as there is an inability to quantify the subjective, there is a chance for all handicappers to find quality winners.

I'm not even slightly familiar with the advanced programs available, or that even may be possibly created, but I'm reasonably confident that what I do on a daily basis would take a monumental effort to quantify accurately. There are many, many subtleties that just can not be effectively quantified. If they could be, they already would be.
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