True pioneer in th game Mark Cramer-Great read.

[Tom]

I have looked high and low for anything by Joe.
A poster here sent me a few articles, but that has been all I could find.
Still looking if anyone has a line or address?

Kiny and Kinkier Handicapping were excellent books!

[blackandtanstable]

I tried to find Joe's stuff but he's been a ghost for many years. My email is blackandtanstable@gmail.com. I would hate to Xerox his stuff, but maybe we can come up with something.

[blackandtanstable]

Tom,

By the way, we have a Facebook Group, "The Handicapper's Insight". Cramer occasionally posts. Feel free to join us if you're into it.

[HalvOnHorseracing]

My brother and I spent a winter in the early 80's developing precise pars for smaller tracks like Centennial (which was replaced by Arapahoe Park) and Turf Paradise. We had hundreds of races that could be separated by class, distance, etc. We didn't need a Beyer figure. We could tell you how fast a particular horse was likely to run on a given day as long as we had current data from one of the tracks we had analyzed. The pars gave us daily track variants and we could precisely compare running times.

At the time there were par figures by track published, but not with the detail we had. It was like stealing money. If a 15-1 shot won, we probably had it.

I had identified a pattern of horses that had been running very poorly and all of a sudden looked like they were coming out of the funk. I called it the Condition Sign and eventually wrote a book about it that sold about 7,000 copies at $20 a copy. (As an aside, Bill Heller wrote about "Sign of Life" horses a few years after I published The Condition Sign. Heller assured me he had never seen my stuff, and he might have convinced me if I didn't recognize the similarities in language in his chapter.) In any case, people started picking up the technique and horses that were previously 15-1 were all of a sudden 5-1.

Of course the point of all this was that if you were willing to spend a lot of time on data analysis not immediately available in racing publications (like Cramer did), your advantage was enormous. At least until everyone caught on to it.

I was still working my figures when CJ came out with pace figures he developed. I figured I could save some work and was one of the early adopters at pacefigures.com We were back in the saddle again.

Of course you know what eventually happened. Beyer sold his figures to DRF. Tomlinson took his secret moneymaker and we now know the strength of characteristics like wet track, turf and distance ability. Moss gave us his pace figures. We know what the horse cost, when a male was gelded, which jockey and trainer combination had positive return - you name it, and it is on some web site.

And of course TimeformUS is now available to everyone. In other words, everyone has most of the data that once was available to only the few. No more smug looks when you're collecting on horses with double digit odds - regularly.

Racing used to be a real puzzle, and solving it was most of the fun. Of course the money was a good reward. Now, it's tough to outsmart the crowd since everything is available to everyone. Everyone is as armed as everyone else. With no work other than opening the Racing Form you can tell which horse has great turf breeding, or might have a proclivity for slopping through the mud.

There are still ways to analyze information and beat the crowd, but it is a lot harder and the big win payoffs are a lot farther apart.

Maybe you think putting everybody else on an information par and then winning is really cool. I liked it better when I had the advantage.

[ReplayRandall]

Originally Posted by HalvOnHorseracing

Maybe you think putting everybody else on an information par and then winning is really cool. I liked it better when I had the advantage.

Horse racing would have died completely 10 years ago if the tech data info wasn't made available to the masses in an easier way, as they were being pounded into oblivion.....but you knew that, I'm sure.


It's harder to climb the mountain again, once you've already been on top. You've just got to reinvent your game once again, just like the rest of us has had to. The NEW pathways to profitability are there, as the other paths are so well traveled now, it actually causes an area of hidden +ROI's, as long as you're willing to expand your mind and do the harder work....WE all like the easiest path, it's called the Highway to Hell....All your friends and buddies are waiting for you there.

[jay68802]

Originally Posted by ReplayRandall

Horse racing would have died completely 10 years ago if the tech data info wasn't made available to the masses in an easier way, as they were being pounded into oblivion.....but you knew that, I'm sure.


It's harder to climb the mountain again, once you've already been on top. You've just got to reinvent your game once again, just like the rest of us has had to. The NEW pathways to profitability are there, as the other paths are so well traveled now, it actually causes an area of hidden +ROI's, as long as you're willing to expand your mind and do the harder work....WE all like the easiest path, it's called the Highway to Hell....All your friends and buddies are waiting for you there.

I'll join you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l482T0yNkeo