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Old 01-19-2018, 01:15 PM   #136
classhandicapper
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Originally Posted by thaskalos View Post
If I held a decision-making position in this game, then I would be handing the PPs out totally free, with no "strings attached"..
I've been wondering what would happen if basic PPs were a lot cheaper, but a significant investment was made in gathering better data, creating proprietary metrics, stats, and algorithms and making that available for a price.

That way, if you are a beginner or want to play the game without significant overhead you could, but if you wanted to get more serious and do research there would be a menu of really GOOD data also.
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Old 01-19-2018, 03:34 PM   #137
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Surely you see the difference. Who needs basketball data?
LOL - Only the winners.
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Old 01-19-2018, 04:24 PM   #138
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Surely you see the difference. Who needs basketball data?
If you believe this then you'd be amazed at the amount of data serious fantasy sports players look at, much less the guys betting thousands on an NBA game.
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Old 01-19-2018, 05:02 PM   #139
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Surely you see the difference. Who needs basketball data?
Surely you don't think that horse players are the only breed of gambler who bother to study statistical data and past performances before putting down their money? Come on now.

No, I don't see any difference. If you want people to wager on your product, you can't just count on them to throw money at you based on gut feelings or horse names. Sure, some casual $2 bettors will do that, but not over any sustained period of time.

Quote:
I've been wondering what would happen if basic PPs were a lot cheaper, but a significant investment was made in gathering better data, creating proprietary metrics, stats, and algorithms and making that available for a price.

That way, if you are a beginner or want to play the game without significant overhead you could, but if you wanted to get more serious and do research there would be a menu of really GOOD data also.
^ This is the correct answer, except make basic PP's free, and then charge for more advanced metrics and stats.

Asking for some basic free data is not unreasonable. It's in the industry's best interest to provide that information to anyone and everyone who may be curious about betting horses. Not hide it behind paywalls, require account signups and deposits, or nickel and dime people who already took the time and effort to show up at your facility and want to bet.

If other sports can do this, there is no reason that horse racing cannot. The idea that it can't be done because <insert track> or <insert ADW> will lose a few bucks is a great example of why racing continues to struggle. We're unable and unwilling to come together and work as an industry on anything. And we're too short-sighted to look past our own bottom lines to see the bigger picture. Otherwise we'd realize that something like this would be good for the industry, and benefit everyone, and that everyone includes themselves.

Last edited by AlsoEligible; 01-19-2018 at 05:05 PM.
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Old 01-19-2018, 06:34 PM   #140
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There's an intellectual property issue behind the past performance data situation.

In most sports, you have a league that collects official statistics. For instance, since someone mentioned baseball, every major league baseball game has been officially scored dating back to the Nineteenth Century. And those scoresheets have always been available for public inspection. Since enough people care about baseball, statistically-minded fans, publishers, and a number of other folks have reviewed those scoresheets and mined the data. Nowadays, of course, the scoresheets are published electronically. As a result, baseball statistics are extremely widely available.

And there's a longstanding tradition of widely available baseball statistics. They were published in books, newspapers, gambling newsletters, team publications, game programs, etc.

In horse racing, something like Equibase is quite recent. The way it used to work 60 years ago was the tracks ran the races, timed them, took a photo finish, and announced the placings. Everything else had to be collected privately. Since data collection was ridiculously expensive, the Daily Racing Form was able to attain a near monopoly on this. And they charged for their product, as every monopolist does.

Over time parts of the monopoly got eroded. For instance, tracks started filming and later videotaping their races, so it now became theoretically somewhat cheaper to collect past performance data. And some tracks began offering their own past performance data, usually pretty limited, in race programs. Harness and quarter horse tracks did this a lot.

But it was only in the last 20 years or so that horse racing really centralized the collection of data. So you had a decades-long tradition of horseplayers paying for statistical data, because rather than being collected by the league (as in baseball), it was collected privately. And that creates entrenched interests who would fight any serious attempt to make the data free.
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Old 01-19-2018, 07:03 PM   #141
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But it was only in the last 20 years or so that horse racing really centralized the collection of data. So you had a decades-long tradition of horseplayers paying for statistical data, because rather than being collected by the league (as in baseball), it was collected privately. And that creates entrenched interests who would fight any serious attempt to make the data free.
I believe the EQb data collection actually began about 32 years ago, but did not go commercial until the early 90s. (Someone may be able to say that it actually went back even further.)

Entrenched data... You are so right. However, pro sports had the same issues in many ways in the "good old days" because the dissemination of information had a bottleneck at the distribution end.

Other sports have done well to keep information flowing to the fan base. IMHO, this could be done by racing.

Remember that EQb is racing.
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Old 01-19-2018, 09:09 PM   #142
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Horse today at Gulfstream Park, the big dog of the tracks this time of year, saw a horse drop from 16-1 at the break to 7-1 as he made the lead and went on to win.
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Old 01-19-2018, 09:34 PM   #143
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Horse today at Gulfstream Park, the big dog of the tracks this time of year, saw a horse drop from 16-1 at the break to 7-1 as he made the lead and went on to win.
Watched the track all day, saw large odd swings during the race 4 times(4 pts or more, all but 1 finished in the money. The one horse I played went from 20-1 to 16-1 and ran 2nd. When you are playing pools that only have 50% of the money in them when they load the gate, you can't tell what you are going to have. I have always thought that betting after the break was a rare incident, but after watching and playing Gulf the last two days, I am beginning to think otherwise.
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Old 01-19-2018, 09:49 PM   #144
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Look at the multi-race payouts to the 7-1 horse though.... he was never going to be 16-1. I completely understand the frustration but I'm not sure there is anything unscrupulous going on.

A quick check of the will pays before plunging into the win pool will save a lot of headaches.
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Old 01-19-2018, 09:56 PM   #145
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Look at the multi-race payouts to the 7-1 horse though.... he was never going to be 16-1. I completely understand the frustration but I'm not sure there is anything unscrupulous going on.

A quick check of the will pays before plunging into the win pool will save a lot of headaches.
I know, made the same point on Twitter. Bettors deserve better than this though.
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Old 01-19-2018, 10:56 PM   #146
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Watched the track all day, saw large odd swings during the race 4 times(4 pts or more, all but 1 finished in the money. The one horse I played went from 20-1 to 16-1 and ran 2nd. When you are playing pools that only have 50% of the money in them when they load the gate, you can't tell what you are going to have. I have always thought that betting after the break was a rare incident, but after watching and playing Gulf the last two days, I am beginning to think otherwise.
I do not believe the issue is ticket cancels or past-posting. Although that might exist, my belief is that it is rare.

I believe that the phenomenon is the result of good handicapping by "The Whales."



About 8 years ago I did a 4-day study of the tote system. I looked at 10 tracks, as I recall. Specifically, I kept 2 sets of numbers:

A. Odds on all horses in the 1st flash after 0 minutes to post.
B. Odds when the race was official (i.e. "Winner's Circle Odds").

I was only interested in the winner.

I came to the following conclusions:

1. Track tendencies could be divided into two categories: High Rebate and Low (or no) Rebate. At that time the dividing line was (I think) about 3%. (Note that breakpoint would be much lower today.)

2. At low-rebate tracks, the breakdown of winners was:
42.5% of winners went down in odds
20.0% of winners stayed at approx. the same odds.
37.5% of winners went up in odds.

3. At high rebate tracks, the breakdown of winners was:
73% of winners went down in odds
9% stayed the same
18% of winners went up in odds

Believe it or don't, as you see fit. Or, better, do your own study. Just takes a little tenacity with screen captures and you're only considering one horse per race.


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Old 01-20-2018, 12:28 AM   #147
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Believe it or don't, as you see fit. Or, better, do your own study. Just takes a little tenacity with screen captures and you're only considering one horse per race.


Dave[/QUOTE]

I have no reason to doubt what you say. I think the problem I see, or have, is more with the % of money in the last dump. I have seen this more than once, since I started paying attention to the last dump into WPS pools.

I have seen the last dump % be any where from as low as .15% to as high as .70%. When that much money is put in last, the people, sometimes me, see "cheating by insiders" or "whales".

A new player is going to be turned off by this, and to help grow the game this % has to be lower. How to lower this is very hard to do. After all, a bankroll of 100,000 is better than 10,000.
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Old 01-20-2018, 12:48 AM   #148
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Jay,

I completely agree.

Here's the thing... it hasn't actually changed. The mechanism, that is. In fact, that is probably part of the problem. (More on that later.)

When I say, "It hasn't actually changed," what I mean is that things are working as they used to.

That is, people bet for 20 minutes or so, while the "smarter players" wait until 2 minutes to post. Then the others bet, some waiting until the the horses are loading.

Among those waiting until the loading are the biggest bettors on the planet.

WHAT HAS CHANGED is that so much handle is being controlled by just a handful of decision makers (i.e. whales).


(This is a long paragraph, so I have intentionally broken it into small bites.)

  • Instead of the gate-load money...
  • being spread across thousands of bettors...
  • with diverse decision approaches...
  • about 6 gigantic players and maybe 50-75 lesser-but-still-huge players (using similar approaches)...
  • are determining the "good bets."

*This results in more extreme fluctuations in the odds.
  • Big money controlled by a small number of people...
  • Results in what appears to be...
  • Bets being made during the race...

*In other words, they land on the same horses a huge percentage of the time.
*They do this because their handicapping is substantially better than the public's.

Why is it different at the low-rebate tracks?
Because the percentage of total handle being bet by the BIG gate-load money is smaller.
What do you think? Does this make sense to you?

Dave
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Old 01-20-2018, 01:25 AM   #149
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This doesn't just happen in the win pool either, it happens in the exacta pool and probably every other pool. The odds get signficantly sharper after the gates open, than even at 30 seconds to post. It's obviously being done robotically at the very last second (probably by some whale computer geniuses), and it is condoned because the tracks don't give a s**t. It's more money in their pocket, but less in 99% of the betting public's.
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Old 01-20-2018, 07:49 AM   #150
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I know, made the same point on Twitter. Bettors deserve better than this though.
Agreed. I imagine anyone posting on this forum is savvy/experienced enough though to check will pays before placing any kind of bet. 90% of the complaining could be avoided by doing so.

Anyone who argues the multi race pools aren't efficient and aren't indicative should be jumping into them with both feet! Can't have it both ways
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