Beating the frustration of the SPLITZACTA

[46zilzal]

Determinism is the view that every event, is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences. This is the view that the database people have of racing but there is a problem: in the Theory of Large Numbers it states:"in probability that describes the long-term stability of the mean of a random variable. Given a random variable with a finite expected value, if its values are repeatedly sampled, as the number of these observations increases, the sample mean will tend to approach and stay close to the expected value (the average for the population). This sample filters out the specifics of an individual case and, along with it, the inherent noise (randomness) expressed, but lost to awareness, since it is averaged away over time. IF we were viewing the TOTAL nature of racing in each race, the information gleaned in a database would be totally relevant, but the specifics of a SINGLE race, THE ONE YOU ACTUALLY BET ON, retains a good degree of the variability which we are unable to predict.

A race represents one if the most vivid examples of "sensitive dependence on initial conditions," the essence of chaos. Rider loses an iron, horse gets bumped, assistant starter doesn't get the horse's head down exactly at the start, rider drops the whip, horse is leaning backwards in the gate as it opens etc. etc. the list is endless.

All of these factors, which can make or break the outcome in a single contest, are LOST in viewing racing as measured in a database. Noise, in this system, can be amplified, markedly, when viewed as a in a single event.

In Chance and Chaos (Princeton U. Press 1991), David Ruele notes on p. 122 and again on 163 two ot the facts in probability studies. First: "Everything points to the fact that we understand only a small part of what there is to understand." Secondly, "We have seen how we IDEALIZE the world around us in physical theories and how chaos limits the intellectual control that we have on the evolution of the world." Again in The Drunkards Walk: How Randomness Rules our Lives, Leonard Mlodine (2008 Pantheon Press) explains in the preface: "The human mind is built to identify for each event a definite cause and therefore has a hard time accepting the influence of unrelated or random factors. The
first step is to realize that success or failure sometimes arise, neither from
great skill or incompetence, but from what economist Armin Alchain calls simply as "fortuitous circumstances."

How does this have any practicality? In my situation, I need to fix the
SPLITZACTA (my term for a trifecta choices where I catch the winner and show horses only). There is even another one often seen in turf races, the BOTTOMZACTA where one misses the winner yet repeatedly catches the place and show horses: THE ANSWER: Accept that, in any particular race, randomness is alive and well functioning in various levels of influence. The ALL button has made the difference in catching those horses that are the recipients of good outcomes in a sea of randomly expressed randomness.

Not quite an epiphnay, but it has changed fortunes substantially.

[Overlay]

I'm not disputing your success with your new approach, but if you're hitting the same two of the three spots consistently (which to me would indicate that those outcomes are not random, especially if the one spot that you're missing is the win or place slot), wouldn't that imply that the horse finishing in the remaining slot is the product of something other than random causation (even if you may not have yet found what the determining mechanism is)? (I exclude the show slot, since I can see where randomness might have a more prominent role in determining which horse happens to finish behind the first two.)