What the whales don't do, apparently

[Elliott Sidewater]

Is to watch how a racing card is playing out. It has already been mentioned in another post that the rail/rail speed was golden at Parx today. I just finished watching the replays and confirmed it for myself. The odds never caught up with the reality of what was happening on the racetrack, and given that about 97% of the handle at parx is bet off track, I have no choice but to conclude that once the whales set their probabilities, they set them in concrete; they don't change them to account for special situations like this one. Perhaps they reduce their exposure in the later races on days when they're getting killed, but if you know what you're looking at, days like today could be a goldmine. I was working today and didn't have an opportunity to play, but I was amazed that the odds continued to be out of sync with reality through the entire card. This is pure speculation, but it is possible that the syndicates are in the "no such thing as a bias" camp. I'd like to hear what others think.

[Dave Schwartz]

Elliot,

This is a really good point that you have made.

When one addresses the question, "How do I compete with the whales?" the logical point is to do what they do not do well. Or, in the words of Wee Willie Keeler, "Hit it where they ain't."

Short term track biases are one area where I would doubt the whales have any interest. The same is probably true for any other high-level math-type, because the sample is just too small to build any correlation co-efficients.

Whether you believe in very short-term track bias shifts or not, logically, this leads us to a question that could improve one's bottom line:

"What factors are typically ignored by the largest and most successful players?"

And a continuation to that question:

"... that is reasonably easy for us to maintain and apply?"

[Stillriledup]

The large computer whales are probably not even watching the races, they set their numbers and let the computer do the rest.

What they also don't do is adjust for a horse who looks bad warming up...i've seen horses sitting on the board at 9-5 soaking wet looking just awful from a body language standpoint and the horse will go from 9-5 to 6-5 which just tells you that there's plenty of money not watching warmups...so that means they're probably not even watching the races sometimes (or all the time)

If your program on how you do things doesn't take video into consideration, you don't even have to watch, you just crunch the numbers on paper, assign percentages and away you go.

[Dave Schwartz]

SRU,

Except for post time.

They need as much money in the pool as possible. Hence, betting too early is not a good thing.

[thaskalos]

With the staff that these Whales employ, and the vast resources that they commit to this game...they can't manage to keep an eye on track biases, and horse body language?

If this assumption is true...then I've got an idea:

What if we build a handicapping network of our own...where we can each be assigned to one of these observational handicapping tasks at each of the different racing locales...so we can all share the combined information...and try to get the upper hand on these Whales in this vital facet of the game?

This may be the "chink in the armor" that we've been looking for, in our battle against these mighty opponents who have been frustrating us for so long.

[Elliott Sidewater]

Although the democratic spirit in me loves your idea of forming a "band of brothers/Robin Hoods", the practical side had to reject it out of order. First of all, understanding, tracking, and exploiting biases is one of the few edges I have left in horse racing, the rest of the lode has been strip mined by those nameless faceless monoliths who cause all of our winners to pay less than they should or used to pay under normal circumstances. To be blunt, it may not be worth my effort to bet horses at all without the aid of my "daily comments" file. My disappointing betting results in 2013 seem to confirm this - on "normal" days I was playing the same horses the whales were on and I struggled to break even. The low odds horses I won on NEVER failed to drop at or after the bell. Second, there is some subjectivity involved in identifying biases and measuring their strength. I developed something I call the "path index" to try to measure it more precisely, but even with it I still have to decide on a worded description to enter in my records. Knowing that future bets will likely be decided and sized by those words makes that decision even harder. Maybe there are easier ways to do this but I only know the hard way that works for me. Maybe it only works because its hard to do. To try and teach this in or to a public forum would likely destroy the residual value the approach still provides. There are still a lot of players out there that deny the existence of track biases and I want (need) them to stick to their guns. Finally, even if we could somehow pull this off, it would be too easy for the whales to infiltrate "the network", and we would end up back where we started in no time, the same as Pittsburgh Phil was when his brilliant invention, the result chart, was exposed to the masses by the publication of the Daily Telegraph.

[lamboguy]

Originally Posted by thaskalos

With the staff that these Whales employ, and the vast resources that they commit to this game...they can't manage to keep an eye on track biases, and horse body language?

If this assumption is true...then I've got an idea:

What if we build a handicapping network of our own...where we can each be assigned to one of these observational handicapping tasks at each of the different racing locales...so we can all share the combined information...and try to get the upper hand on these Whales in this vital facet of the game?

This may be the "chink in the armor" that we've been looking for, in our battle against these mighty opponents who have been frustrating us for so long.

there are big whales that already do this, one of them happens to post on this board once in awhile and in my opinion is the best horse player around.

[barn32]

Originally Posted by Elliott Sidewater

The low odds horses I won on NEVER failed to drop at or after the bell.

I'm curious what percentage of horses win that don't drop at or after the bell?

[Capper Al]

Originally Posted by Elliott Sidewater

Is to watch how a racing card is playing out. It has already been mentioned in another post that the rail/rail speed was golden at Parx today. I just finished watching the replays and confirmed it for myself. The odds never caught up with the reality of what was happening on the racetrack, and given that about 97% of the handle at parx is bet off track, I have no choice but to conclude that once the whales set their probabilities, they set them in concrete; they don't change them to account for special situations like this one. Perhaps they reduce their exposure in the later races on days when they're getting killed, but if you know what you're looking at, days like today could be a goldmine. I was working today and didn't have an opportunity to play, but I was amazed that the odds continued to be out of sync with reality through the entire card. This is pure speculation, but it is possible that the syndicates are in the "no such thing as a bias" camp. I'd like to hear what others think.

Read CX Wong's book. He goes into great detail on how some whales work. His group might of caught the bias.

[ronsmac]

Originally Posted by thaskalos

With the staff that these Whales employ, and the vast resources that they commit to this game...they can't manage to keep an eye on track biases, and horse body language?

If this assumption is true...then I've got an idea:

What if we build a handicapping network of our own...where we can each be assigned to one of these observational handicapping tasks at each of the different racing locales...so we can all share the combined information...and try to get the upper hand on these Whales in this vital facet of the game?

This may be the "chink in the armor" that we've been looking for, in our battle against these mighty opponents who have been frustrating us for so long.

If whales aren't paying attention to track bias, let's not talk about it on a public forum.

[Capper Al]

Originally Posted by ronsmac

If whales aren't paying attention to track bias, let's not talk about it on a public forum.

Why? Are you saying you are a whale? Or have inside info? Whale hunting is my favorite sport.

[Elliott Sidewater]

Al, what is the title of the book?

[traynor]

Originally Posted by thaskalos

With the staff that these Whales employ, and the vast resources that they commit to this game...they can't manage to keep an eye on track biases, and horse body language?

If this assumption is true...then I've got an idea:

What if we build a handicapping network of our own...where we can each be assigned to one of these observational handicapping tasks at each of the different racing locales...so we can all share the combined information...and try to get the upper hand on these Whales in this vital facet of the game?

This may be the "chink in the armor" that we've been looking for, in our battle against these mighty opponents who have been frustrating us for so long.

Jim Selvidge did just that about 30 years ago.

[Dave Schwartz]

I'm curious what percentage of horses win that don't drop at or after the bell?

I have discussed this before, Barn, but the simple version is it depends upon the size of the rebate at the track. The higher the rebate available, the greater the downward price swing from 0 mins to winner circle price.

Here is an approximation:
At a near zero track it goes like: 40%-20%-40% (go up, same, down, respectively).

At a high rebate track it is like: 10-20-70. (Actually, the "down" is a little more, but close enough.)

[davew]

I suspect the whale groups take Mon/Tue off - it is difficult to run 7 days a week with a small group of specialized employees.

The speed bias yesterday help severely lower the chances of some heavy favorites, but it was not always easy to determine which horses would be in the lead at the start.