Mark Cramer
C & X Report

C&X 13
CONTENTS
Editorial: the Horse in Me
Research of the Month: first claims, by Ed Bain
Eliminations, an article catalyzed by comments from Don A
BC Projections from Arc Weekend
C&X Café
Can you quantify the form factor?

NOTE. Sorry we’re late with this issue. I had a noble purpose. Even though I was anxious to get this month’s incredible Research of the Month to you ASAP, the Arc weekend also saw some extremely strategic prep races for the Breeders Cup, in both America and Europe, and I wanted to comment on those events. Looks like the only way to be timely is to be a little flexible with the deadline. My apologies if it’s caused any anxiety.
Mark

EDITORIAL
THE HORSE IN ME
Looking for correlations, I have noticed that a few good layoff trainers happen to keep their horses in their own training centers. Having seen horses day after day cooped up in stalls for most of the day, and then walking around in circles with the walking machine, I have wondered whether this is the best way to keep a horse fit.
I wonder if the quality of life of horses that take regular and leisurely gallops in the park, as they do in France, would be better than life in a stall. They’re supposed to be dumb animals, but not knowing how to talk to them, I prefer to give them the benefit of the doubt. I suspect that they’d rather prance over a wooded path than walk around in circles, in the same way that I prefer to cycle on a country road rather than on a stationary bike at home.
I recall the brief interlude in my life when I lived in the country, with my hens, pigs and goat, along with a garden and fruit trees. My dumb hens enjoyed roaming free and looking for pebbles, escaping from the rooster, and just taking things in. The pigs had room to roll around. When I had to kill a hen or send a pig to the slaughterhouse, I knew the meat would taste better than what I got in the supermarket. Industrialization is not a good thing for our food. That’s my reactionary opinion. By being good to the animals, we are good to ourselves.
I would love to be able to research the trainers who allow their horses to prance in the meadow. I suspect that these horses will stay fit for longer periods, and perform better in the races. By getting exercise when they want it, that exercise should have a better effect on their performance.
Should. But I could be wrong. Would those C&X subscribers who are veterinarians let me know if I’m spouting off like an errant Vesuvius.
Recent studies have shown that casual exercise for human beings is at least as effective, and sometimes more so, than targeted or regimented exercise. Could this be true for horses as well?
Back to my original hypothesis, I am suspecting that trainers who give their horses enjoyable and more frequent exercise may be better at bringing them back after a layoff. Impossible to research such a possibility without going across the country and visiting training centers, observing the daily life of horses.
The victory of America America in the July 4 Lone Star Oaks lends support to my hypothesis. With that victory, the filly increased her earnings to $395,050. She’s won routes and sprints, on grass and on dirt, at 19 different tracks, including in Europe. The surprise is that she’s part of a one-horse stable. Her owner-trainer, Franck Mourier, a French immigrant to the USA, gives his filly natural feed, and respects his “partner” by allowing her to live a dope-free existence.
According to journalist Stan Bergstein, who profiled the trainer, “he spends two hours in the morning and one in the afternoon walking with his filly, in the woods if available”. Thinking holistically, the trainer feels that health and soundness relate to happiness, and that happiness improves performance.
It would be much easier to research the performance of horses from happy barns if we could travel to and observe the training styles in person. Meanwhile, we can begin to look into this possibility if C&X readers have any anecdotal evidence to share with us. Anecdotal evidence can be misleading, for sure. But it’s a way of exploring this possibility.
Dickenson, of course, is the example. But is he the rule or the exception? Let us know about any stables you’ve observed at your local circuits.
RESEARCH OF THE MONTH (AND MAYBE OF THE DECADE): CLAIMS
by Ed Bain
One of the more interesting aspects of betting trainer stats is tracking claiming trainers. I track the 1st 2nd 3rd and 4th race after a claim, separated by sprint and route. For the last four years there have been 49,993 1st races after a claim in Sprints or Routes. This amounts to 12,498 claims per year or about 1,041 a month, or 34 claims a day, every day of the year. There were 7,884 winners: 1,971 1st after a claim winners per year or about 164 winners per month, which produced 5 winners per day every day of the year. The factor: 1st after a claim in a Sprint or Route, in the last four years, produced a 15% win rate. It makes sense to use solid stats like this as a point of departure and then zoom in on the best situations, and the trainers who specialize in first after claim.
The trainers who interest me the most are those who claim from the maiden claiming ranks. The reason is, this is the lowest class of horse at every track and is the most difficult race to produce a win. The trainers who place a claim on maiden claimers are making a statement that this horse has never won but I can produce a win. There were 2,272 first after a claim sprint maiden claimer, (a sprint is 7 furlongs or less and this is 4% of the total claims). Of these, 494 won for a 22% win rate. That’s 7 percentage points better than the overall first-claim stat! The average win mutuel was $9.27 and a positive Return On Investment of $2.01 on a two dollar bet if you bet all 2,272 races.
Most trainers are too cautious and do not claim maiden claimers. Scott Lake has claimed 646 horses the last 4 years and won with 149 for a 23% win rate, with an average win mutuel is $7.85 and a $2 ROI of $1.82. Lake made 19 claims from maiden claim sprints and won with 8 for a 42% win rate and an average win mutuel of $7.07 with a $2 ROI of $2.97.
Brian Koriner, from Northern California, had the largest average win mutuel on Maiden Claims, $16.36; he claimed 17 and had 6 wins for a 37% win rate with a $2 ROI of $5.77.
Steve Knapp, from the same circuit, had 8 wins for 16 tries for a 50% strike rate on his 1st after a claim sprint in maiden claim. He produced a $10.97 average win mutuel and an ROI of $5.48.
Tim Ritchey from Delaware claimed 9 and won with 5 for a 55% win rate with an average win mutuel of $7.00 and an ROI of $3.88.
Mike Mitchell, who states, “God tells me which horses to claim,” is one of the really great claiming trainers of all time from the Southern California circuit. Mitchell has claimed 11 maiden claimers and hit with 5 for a 45% win rate. Mitchell had a rather low average win mutuel of $5.28 but still made money with a $2.40 ROI.
Alfredo Marquez also from Southern Cal circuit is 5 for 8 with his first time maiden claimed sprinters. He has a $6.84 average win mutual and a $2 ROI of $4.27.
Betting stats like first after a maiden claim is not “gambling” because of the known win rate and average win mutual and Return On Investment. It defies the imagination that handicappers can still be saying “I won’t play maiden races because they are too unpredicatable”. The only way you know something is either predicatable or unpredictable by producing a stat.
Gamblers have little control over their game because betting horses is based on probabilities not certainties. Using stats, handicappers can minimize the risks associated with betting because of the known long-term win rates will not vary unless the rules of the game change: first after a claim; maiden claim sprint: 2,272 claims, 494 wins for a 22% win rate and an average win mutuel of $9.27 and a $2 ROI of $2.01.
Ed Bain is the author of 4 + 30: Percentages and Profitability. Veteran C&X readers are well aware of my opinion of horseplayer Ed Bain. He’s a professional. He bets on his stats. He bets a generous amount. He limits his bets to four per day, by using a complex set of filters. He keeps meticulous records. He makes adjustments according to those records. By emulating his record keeping alone, you will improve your ROI. You can find out more about Ed at http://www.altiplanopublications.com/


ELIMINATIONS:
WHERE TEXT BOOK CASES END, AND CREATIVE THINKING BEGINS

Consider a letter from Don A:

C&X readers have inquired and you asked for observations on the BIG WIN hores that won at Canterbury on claiming day. My observation is: ALL the big win horses that day ran within a tick or two (plus or minus) of that track's par at 30K level. Alll, with one exception, (banished lover, whose big win came 3 back had their win accompanied by 2nd call par in there last race. Taking note of that I incorporated that thinking into my own analysis. With your analysis of the Pa. derby coming off as helter skelter and no one standing out, it became apparent that the big win MSW and allowance horse had to be conisdered. He ran 3 times, had 2 big wins, both within par at the 2nd call and more importantly, both of these big wins had outstanding come home time. (:24 variety). Come home time separates really good horses from "in form horses". I wish I had the past performance of the race before I went to the simulcast so this could have been conveyed before hand. After the fact doesn't mean as much--however-the observation still holds and horses like the Pa derby winner are few and far between. But 2 year old and 3 year old horses can do just that in their own age group. To be sure: C&X, and C&X readers coupled with your race analyses went a long way in guiding me to that winner. I'm sure there will be many more. Pace isn't your cup of tea---but in this instance par coupled with the big win seems to be a powerful factor. Don A

Now consider my pre-race website comment on the eventual winner of the Pa Derby:

I was first attracted to this race because it's the Derby B team, and with A team defections, a possible new kid on the block could emerge from this race as a possible A team candidate. So I projected.LOVE OF MONEY? Dutrow's a great trainer, but a 6-length win in the slop at alw nw1 is not a great indicator, pro or con. The 25% Dutrow is only a 17 percent winner in stakes, and a thorough flat bet loss. The breeding says maybe 1 1/6 but not necessarily 1 1/8. This is an "if" candidate that cannot be completely tossed, but cannot be projected. In a B-team field with no real A-team candidates, this is the mystery horse. In a race without much route speed at all, we have a sprint speed horse going long. Always a danger.

Nothing was missing from my analysis. This horse was on top of all my comments. So where did I go wrong?
A successful horseplayer must be acutely attentive to each and every decision made ... good and bad. Otherwise you decline into a shoulda-coulda-woulda mode.
In a race in which I could not eliminate half the field, the elimination process (a la the Short Form article) shifts to a what-is-there-to-like-about-each-horse? mode.
Once in this mode, the first thing I do is look for the different horse.
If I can envision this horse as being 6-1 or less (in my own personal evaluation), based on the pros and cons, then he becomes my go-to horse: that is, if I can get an overlay.
I had various things to like about Love of Money, as stated above:
(1) he was not on the “B-team” of 3-year-olds”;
(2) he was sprint speed versus not much route speed.
I ultimately decided to not make a line on the race, mainly, because I did not know what to do about this horse, for two reasons:
(1) his Big Win came on a wet track, and wet-track wins are often by large margins, with so many horses in a field not taking to the surface. It is difficult (for me) to project a performance off a wet-track win.
(2) had I found any pedigree indication whatsover for the mile and an eighth, that might have been enough to use him as a contender. However, I could not get him past the mile and a sixteenth, so pedigree did not give this horse an extra push.
Sometimes we get too smart for our own good. As you know, I had done research on mud breeding and the Mr. Prospector line comes out shining in the rain. This was corroborated by a 413 Tomlinson wet rating.
Cramer poses naked
Here I am exposing the inner workings of my mind as it led to a failure to act on “the different horse”. By letting you see me reasoning, I am exposing my potential frailties. If we were doing interactive postings, you could fire off an e-mail and tell me what I missed. What would you have said if my analysis had been interactive and we were working as a group?
Ultimately, I backed off not because I was against the horse but because the information that was for the horse was somewhat fragile. I told myself that his Big Win in the mud was probably aided by his 413 Tomlinson, and therefore did not lend itself to be projected objectively today.
But I can see where Don would have capitalized on what was written. Don, you can tell by the last comment in the Love of Money insert that I do indeed respect pace.
The lesson
There are several lessons.
First, as soon as we have gone through the process and discovered that negative eliminations do not lead to tossing at least half the field, we still have a chance to view the field from a positive what-can-they-do perspective. The trick is to do both simulaneously: eliminating and finding positive assets.
Second, finding “the different horse” could be something that we could upgrade to a more automatic stature. Perhaps the combination of (a) the different horse and (b) a supertrainer like Dutrow could be the spark that ignites an automatic play. Sure, Dutrow has a flat-bet loss in stakes races, but we know not what his flat-bet stakes record is with “different horses” ... and (c), when we have a race in which the main trait of the field is “B-team” of a class or generational level (or any lesser-of-evils field), then the different-horse factor should be given greater weight.
After receiving some reader questions on eliminations, I reflected on my past records. I discovered that the elimination process (proven losers at the level, no-win trainers/jockeys, wrong surface/distance, etc.) does not have to precede the positive-attribute stage. The creative mind functions with more agility when it is not forced into an all-negative or all-positive mode.
By doing eliminations while closing the mind to positive attributes, the handicapper risks passing over a good thing. The most appropriate illustration for this particular issue of C&X is the automatic elimination of proven losers at the class level in maiden claiming ranks. This elimination is very effective statistically. However, the claimed horse from a maiden claiming loss presents us with the contrary logic, as Ed Bain’s statistic proves so powerfully.

PROJECTIONS FROM ARC WEEKEND FOR BC AND BEYOND
Rarely is there a weekend with so races of long-term significance. Let’s pick out a few key points.
On the front end of a trend
We are at the very beginning of a trend, and now’s the time to get on. It started when the American turf horse Hard Buck shipped to Ascot this past summer and finished second in a prestigious Grade I race.
Next came Var, a former Mott horse, winner of optional claiming races at Churchill and Calder, who shipped to England and won the Starlit Stakes, on September 11, a 6-furlong listed event at Goodwood, at 16-1.
For more than two decades, Euro horses have been shipping to the States and cleaning up. Var achieved the reverse feat coming back after an 8-month layoff.
Next time out, only a week later, you’d think he’d have bounced. But he finished second in a Grade III, by a neck, having put a way the other speed horses and lost to the closer. An eternal handicapping factor: horse duels, puts away all rivals, gets caught by opportunistic closer. Bet this horse when he finds a better pace scenario.
Next time out, on October 3, Arc day, in the prestigious Grade I Prix de l’Abbaye (a race that was won by Dayjur, leading to his near win in the BC Sprint), Var defeated the same horse that had nipped him the time before.
The obvious lesson is that a good optional claiming sprinter from the USA can defeat the best Euro sprinters, and this year, no European sprinter has a prayer in the BC-Sprint.
But Hard Buck’s success at the aristocratic Ascot meet shows that American hardknockers can hold their own on European turf at longer distances as well.
Handicapping is a tough game, as the good pick of Ouija Board illustrates. It’s a grand struggle to squeeze out an edge. That’s why I like to jump on a trend before it’s penetrated into the betting consciousness, as I did with the Gary Stevens bets.
In the global economy, we can bet on horses anywhere in the world. Legal British bookies gladly take American action. The advantage of being on the front end of a trend is greater than the most masterful handicapping.
Here’s a job for the C&X community. Anyone who sees any mention of an American trainer’s plans to ship a horse to Europe should immediately send us an e-mail. This info can come from DRF articles, or from local program notes. If I see any American horses entered in a Euro race, I’ll post it on our site.
It takes owners and trainers a long time to learn lessons, but the above two horses will inevitably lead to more American shippers. The most obvious move would be for American horses to ship to Europe this winter for all-weather racing (which is gloried dirt racing). They will have the edge and the local bettors won’t know what hit them.
Some F&M Possibilities
The first reaction following the Arc was that Ouija Board would be headed for the BC-F&M. I’d love to see her face of against Kitten’s Joy in the BC-Turf, which is her best distance. But that probably won’t happen.
Angle: for three of the past four years, my pick in the Arc came back to win the next time out in a Grade I. Ouija Board fits this pattern.
If it rained at Lone Star (fat chance), James Toner’s big-win femmeWonder Again would have a great chance. She trounces her rivals by huge margins when the turf is soft or yielding.
Frankel’s Light Jig won the Yellow Ribbon by 4 lengths, the widest margin of victory in the history of that race. Could that not qualify for the Big-Win method?
Godolphin’s Crimson Palace defeated Riskaverse in the Beverly D, and that one came back to win the Flower Bowl. Dettori aboard Crimson Palace could win the F&M.
Back to Ouija Board, what would have happened in the Arc if she’s had her regular rider Fallon aboard? She likes a glib surface and will most likely get it at Lone Star.
In any case, what do you think? The Arc de Triomphe as a prep race for the F&M.
The winner of the Prix de l’Opera, a key prep for the BC F&M, is no superstar. What kind of filly has a name like Alexander Goldrun. The horse from that race that seemed headed to the F&M was the Fabre filly, Grey Lilas, a former Gary Stevens mount. I’ve always felt this filly was talented but lacked the finishing punch. She may not come to Texas.
Musical Chimes’ only USA win was in a short field of six horses. She has underperformed thus far.
BC Turf
Powerscourt won a key race in the Arlington Million, and this is one more indicator that the Aidan O’Brien stable is heating up. This horse needed the Big L.
Kitten’s Joy is the hot news, having dominated the Grade I Joe Hirsh Turf Classic by an impressive 2 ½ lengths. Awesome is an understatement. Four Turf Classic winners have gone on to win the BC Turf. But EVERYBODY knows about him.
I would say that Arc winner Bago’s handlers have made the right decision in pointing to the Classic.
Michael Stoute’s North Light would be a seductive possibility if he came. In the Arc he led or dueled until the last quarter, on a track that was not favoring speed and at a pace that made it impossible to win. Under such circumstances, his fifth place finish is much more impressive than it looked. Euro speed horses that race against a bias are often big improvers in the USA.
BC Classic
Bravo Funny Cide. Makes the Classic more interesting. In the Jockey Club Gold Cup, he beat the same type of no-win horses that Pleasantly Perfect defeated in the Pacific Classic.
Even my 94-year-old Aunt Ada, who knows nothing about racing, was excited about Funny Cide’s win. Goes to show that horses that stick around instead of going to the breeding shed can perk up this game and make it more culturally acceptable. Geldings should get extra purse money because, by sticking around instead of going off to stud, they bring in more fans to the game.
Funny Cide had a perfect trip. The Classic will be more difficult. Pleasantly Perfect got a 112 Beyer in the Pacific Classic, not as big as you would want for a BC Classic winner, but the crafty Mandella is really pointing for a repeat at Lone Star.
Ghostzapper’s 114 Beyer in the Woodward makes this versatile and dominant horse a possibility. The distance is a huge question mark.
Birdstone is yet another possibility, having won two prestigious races, though defeating The Cliff’s Edge is not a clear indicator that Birdstone is yet a dominant horse. But you can’t blame the horse if the field was questionable.
Can Bago upset? We won’t find out anything from his tight-lipped British trainer, who pretty much ignored the woman who was interviewing him on national TV, causing the moderator to call him “only mildly polite”.
Bago is supposed to travel to Texas? He has the same daddy as Swain. Swain would have won the Classic had he not floated out to the grandstand in the stretch. My feeling is that Bago can do it. He’s 5-1 at the British bookies but will probably be more at Lone Star. Pleasantly Perfect and Funny Cide defeated “the usual suspects” (I mean suspect horses). For example, Perfect Drift couldn’t even win the Hawthorne Gold Cup.
Go Bago, but don’t leave Mandella off your pick 3.
The BC Mile
The Mile could be an indicator for the Classic. Bago defeated a filly named Cacique, twice. Cacique went on to win the Grade II filly & mare race at Longchamp on Arc weekend. Cacique is reportedly headed for the BC Mile. Though she defeated a suspect field, the mile and an eighth at Longchamp was beyond her distance. She is very much a miler. She will have to defeat a deep field, including other talented Europeans. If she does, it will make Bago look even better later on in the card.
The precedent of a Euro horse who won a Group II at Longchamp going on to win the BC mile was set by Domedriver.
Other Euro horses such as Six Perfections are iffy at this point, so I prefer to wait for later news on this event. Check the website during the week leading up to the BC. If everything works out, this time I won’t be doing my handicapping in a hospital.
The BC Sprint
The sprinter of the year may not even enter the BC Sprint. Pico Central ran away from Spreightstown and Cajun Beat in the Vosburgh. His handlers would have to fork out $200,000 to get him into the race. He probably qualifies for the title of 2004 sprint champion even if he’s not entered, and 6 furlongs may be a tad short for his best aptitudes. There’s a lot of incentive to not enter him.
Spreightstown inherits the role of most likely winner, but several veterans of this race may return to challenge.
Midas Eyes matures with grace and could be solid.
The Melbourne Cup
Watch out for Dermot Weld’s Vinnie Roe, who passed the Arc for a trip to Australia.

C&X Café
Mark

Just renewed my subscription of C and X. Just thought i would give you the heads up on some alternative pedigree plays. Breeders who breed to race look at pedigrees in different ways. One place to look at is Ellen Parker's Reine de course at
http://www.reines-de-course.com/. The horses to watch list picks some good long shots.

Jack Glengary's website has a nice summarry of line breeding and books on breeding at
http://www.glengarrybooks.co.nz/

A subscription to the pedigreequery website($60/6 months) provides GSV numbers which estimates the potential of a racehorse.

http://www.pedigreequery.com/

The GSV numbers are explained at George Smith's website. Some of the matings he has arranged include Vindication, Farma Amida, Lac Ouimet, and Carr de Naskra


http://www.members.shaw.ca/thematchmaker/index3.html

Bill Lanthrop is soon publishing his findings on Conduit Mares which he says is more predictable than Dosage index in projecting the ability of a horse to get the classic distances.




http://www.dimarpublishing.citymaker.com/page/page/1367142.htm

On a more main line handicapping methods you should talk to Dave Schwartz of http://www.horsestreet.com/

Your article on Wisdom of the Crowds is programmed into his program as ANTS. The way this part of the program works is you filter a series of races that are similar to todays race. The computer makes ANTS that set up random systems. These ants handicap a portion of the filtered races and compete against each other. The weak ANTS die off and are replaced by different ANTS. After a few hundred races, the surviving ANTS are pretty good at picking horses.

One other thing Schwartz has attepted to do is to quantify form. A discussion of this is seen on the following thread.


http://www.paceadvantage.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=7313&highlight=form


Looking forward to future issues of C and X

Rick Irvin

Cramer responds:
Rick’s final reference, about quantifying form, would be of vital importance. I told him I’m a skeptic, but that I’m always open to new ideas. I have trouble enough quantifying my own form. Lafton-Parias, the trainer of the Arc favorite Prospect Park, mentioned that the failure in the Arc may well be attributed to the fact that he worked too hard in the prep race, the Prix Niel, the same race that the winner Bago came out of. We’d have had to interview the riders of those horses and then talk to the grooms to find out which one of them benefited by or was hurt by the prep. In other words, which one would be likely to improve and which one could decline. On quantifying form, we already have Ragozin and Thoroughgraph. The C&X Café would be interested in hearing from users of these form-quantifying methods. I’ve used them here and there just to study them, and have mixed feelings. (See article that follows.)
A couple of the sites Rick refers us to deal with pedigree evaluation that considers the dam more important than the sire. Objectively, there should be no way that one side can be more dominant than another, at least not in the long run. However, dam info is always pari-mutuelly significant because it’s underused by the public. It’s just a helluva lot harder to keep stats on dams, and it would help if those mares could have babies more often.
In any case, I’ve printed the sites Rick recommends without passing judgment. As for the ANTS, you know that I am intellectually enthralled by this programming idea but I humbly admit that I do not have the technological knowledge to get beyond understanding the concept. ANTS is a more sophisticated version of programs based on chaos theory. Such approaches try to show when we should expect the unexpected.
I wonder if ANTS could have predicted that Acropolis, the longest shot on the Arc board, would have finished fourth. Acropolis, by the way, is trained by Aidan O’Brien, whose stable has been cold for most of this year. The Acropolis wake-up was paired with a Grade I win for O’Brien’s two-year-old, Oratorio. I can’t stop believing that trainer form overlaps with horse form, which makes quantifying form an intricate art, but maybe not a science.
Huge fields, races within a race, difficult-to-predict pace scenarios, and other near-chaos factors are worthy of ANTS research.

Mark: Bago was part of the mutuel field in the US so i ended up backing into awin at 2-1 as the odds dropped late. i however missed the exacta as i didnot read carefully enough your notes and had others under but not the secondplace finisher. i think the ex here was somewhere around $140.in the end i showed a profitthanksjm

Cramer responds :
In the French betting pool I used the top key filly (9-1) with everything I couldn’t eliminate in what they call the place quinella, which means you have to get first, second or third in any order. Cherry Mix and Bago were in the mix. But that only served to bail me out from catastrophe, as I had two units to win on the filly Ouija Board and a backup unit win bets on the Dettori horse and on Blue Canari. Plus a couple of backup place quinellas with the Dettori horse. Sometimes I’m a smartass and I pay for it. The more I saw the replays, the more I believe that the filly could have won it. Her trip reminded me of the San Diego Freeway on the way out from Hollywood Park at rush hour. This is a great game, and even my wife Martha, who cares not for racing, was excited by the filly’s stretch move.
PS. My kinky rider angle, betting back a usually mediocre rider when he’s peaking, did indeed work out for Cristophe Lemaire, but not on Blue Canari. Lemaire won a Grade I baby race, and he could be that jockey to follow, since he’s young enough to become the next Olivier Peslier.
Speaking of riders, it was inspiring to see the Belgian kid Cristophe Soumillon aboard the second-place Cherry Mix lean over and kiss his 35-year old colleague Gillet just past the finish line in a brilliant show of solidarity. In the jockey room, it was Soumillon who popped the champaign and doused his mentor.
And finally, Cherry Mix would most likely have been Gary Stevens mount, had he stayed in France. Wonder what Gary is thinking. Check his site at www.garystevens.com

CAN YOU QUANTIFY THE FORM FACTOR?
Back in the first half of the 1980s, I was only beginning to bet seriously on a daily basis, still searching for a magic factor. One thing I knew. He who can project a form reversal has the edge.
I hung out with a loosely organized group of horseplayers deeply involved in a rich exchange of ideas. Gradually, the group divided into spheres. There was the traditionalist sphere, very much in touch with the ideas of Frederick Davis and William Quirin. They would beat there heads against the wall trying to refine the same factors that everyone else was already aware of.
The rest of us became refusers. We respected The Academy of Speed, Pace, Recency and Class, but we knew that the very best those guys could do was trade money.
Longshot trainer standings
I began to keep a record of all trainers and situations in Southern California that produced longshot winners, and meaningful patterns began to emerge. Richard Matlow and Richard Mandella with first-time starters, John Gosden with Euro shippers first time in the USA, Mike Mitchell with first-claims (see Ed Bain’s article). Flat-bet profit patterns.
I kept records of all form reversals and noticed that more than half of them were linked directly to trainer specialties. Of course, this was before trainer records were readily available.
One of the traditionalists from the Quirin group often took out my Mike Mitchell first-claim bets for me. (Ed Bain’s article brings back this nostalgia.) My colleague refused to believe that such things could happen. I mean, betting a trainer, without even handicapping. He collected my winning bets for me, all the while insisting that I was not doing handicapping. In academia, such people are unbearable. Many of them become economists. They have theories. Win or lose, they get paid for those theories. But they never have to put two dollars on any of their pronouncements.
Mitchell was on a true binge. Mitchell with McCarron, Mitchell with Kenny Black, and later Mitchell with Valenzuela. I used only those Mitchell claims that had been off the board in the race the horse was claimed from. As a side dish, I also threw out any horse claimed from Mitchell. This was the first time that I knew you could win at this game. Mitchell had converted me into a born-again handicapper. I had discovered a perverse god. The man who took out my bets became resentful. He continued to use his speed figures, coming up with the same horses as everyone else.
He probably resented the fact that he knew so much and I knew so little. I picked up the form, scanned for Mitchell claims, and that was it. He did all-nighters with the pps.
In those days, the public did not catch on so quickly. By the time they did, Mitchell’s star had faded. Temporarily. He’s a periodical phenomenon. He has his cycles. He arrives much more frequently than Haley’s Comet. In any case, I got off when I saw the average odds decline.
A decade later, I would do the same thing with the Tomlinson turf pedigree ratings in grass maiden races. I backed only horses that had stunk up the track on the dirt but were bred to love the grass. First time on the grass. Sometimes second time on the grass if they had a beautiful excuse for finishing off the board in their first turf try. This was another period when racing was helping me to fill the refrigerator, fill the tank, and pay the mortgage.
But these periods do not last. As time goes by, the information gets released to the public, the public consciousness changes, wisens up, and new form reversal angles must be discovered. We must always be in search of a new edge. The only one who refused to give credence to form reversals is this is the guy who originally was putting in my Mitchell claim wagers.
I relate these anecdotes because what I have to say has a long history behind it. The art of uncovering form reversals may indeed by quantifiable ... BUT, whatever procedure we use must be flexible and sensitive to changing trends and particular horse scenarios.
The program we would like to create would have to include a built-in function that would decide when the trainer factor is independent of the horse factor, when the horse factor is independent of the trainer factor, and when these two realms overlap, and how they overlap.
The Rebound Method
Consider the Rebound Method, that veteran C&X readers are aware of. The original rules were:
(1) Horse must have finished first, second or third in a comeback race (45 days off or longer).
(2) Horse must have regressed or “bounced” in the second race back after the layoff (lower Beyer fig and poorer finish position).
(3) Bet this horse third time back.
After a series of on-paper tests were profitable, I tested with real money. I began with a big profit but came upon a prolonged losing streak. I got off when I was even, and resolved to find the wrinkles and iron them out.
I thought I was on to a way to quantifying form cycle, but something was missing.
A colleague and research specialist sent me an independent sample, exacta same rules, of 432 races in which there was a 27 percent profit. He had 13 groups of about 35 races in each group. Nine of the groups were profitable and the others were not. In appearance, his research had confirmed my own.
But he noted that there was one string of 70 races that showed a net loss. How many of us are prepared to sit out a 70-race dry spell.
In other words, some of the mechanical bets that appear to disintegrate in the long run may be on a temporary down period, and the long run may still be only the short run.
In my real-wager research, the moment I finally decided to get off was after was when a horse broke the losing streak. It was worse than losing. Imagine going through a dozen losing races and then breaking the ice with a dead heat win that returns $3.20 for each two bucks.
An unmodest proposal
What I propose is the ideological cousin of what Ed Bain does. He has trainer stats, and then applies past performance “filters”. I have a mechanical past performance method, based on the form factor, and I see the need of applying a trainer filter.
The primitive way to do this is simply to establish a minimum trainer win percentage. However, I’m looking for something more nuanced. In looking at the specific races from my previous research samples, I realize that the trainer factor enters the equation in a different proportion for each horse.
In some cases, the apparent bounce may simply be the trainer’s instructions to give the horse an easy race second time back. I know this is possible since several trainers have confided to me that they use The Sheets and adapt a horse’s schedule to avoid the bounce or minimize its effect.
Factor incest
If you think about it, once trainers are aware of a “quantifiable” form factor, they can intervene and modify the effects of such a factor. This is what I call “factor incest”. Cause and effect become locked in a confusing embrace. No linear computer program can unlock the dynamics. None that I know of. Maybe ANTS.
For we would need a program in which countless different thinkers zoomed in on the same situational factor, and maybe came up with different conclusions. Thirteen ants might conclude that the horse’s second race after the layoff was a no-try, intended to ease the horse through the expected sorness. Twenty-three ants might conclude that the horse was not bouncing temporarily, that the trainer only excels on Lay-1, and that this particular horse is only good for one peak performance in a year. Thirty-eight ants might decide that the trainer is not sensitive to such issues, and for this reason his horses are likely to bounce and come back to fire their best shot in their third try: in other words, they exclude the trainer factor.
If that’s not enough, the twenty-three ant minority might be more dominant than the thirty-eight ant majority.
As you can see, such a task is too big for yours truly. I throw this out for discussion, just in case we have a gifted programmer in the C&X community.
Mind alteration
During the past year and some odds months, I have attempted to alter my own mind. What I mean is that, if I could be successful in getting my mind to function like 20,000 ants, I might be able to deal with the complexity of the past performances. My wife is concerned that I might be creating a Frankenstein from within.
I realize that the Arc pps were very much a question of form analysis. The Prix Niel prep saw several good horses fail to win, among them Blue Canari and Bago. I made both of them contenders but had to decide which one would most likely improve after the prep. The stables of both horses admitted that the Niel was a prep.
In the end, I decided to lean heavily on the trainer factor. A thousand and some odd ants dealt with the trainer factor and were pretty much unanymous that Bary was a better trainer than Pease at following through on a trainer intention. At least 18,000 ants in my head were not activated. Some of them were pedigree ants. Others may have told me that Blue Canari had one Big race in his pps and other mediocre ones while Bago had more long-term potential.
My point is that quantifying the form factor is no simple task. Handicappers who wish to do it with the human mind need to expand that mind and release all kinds of hidden sparks.
Art or science
It all boils down to whether handicapping is a science or an art. Clearly it is both, and I have seen winning handicappers who weigh in on both sides of the equation. I believe that in order to quantify form, we would need an artistic programmer, someone who already thinks in a non-linear way. Stay tuned.
PS
Check the website for BC commentary beginning on the Monday or Tuesday before the big day. If you have not yet checked my own personal website, it’s www.altiplanopublications.com

THE CIA EXPERIMENTS WITH HANDICAPPERS

In an effort to understand strategies in analysis and decision making, the CIA asked eight experienced horserace handicappers to participate in a research project. The handicappers were given a list of 88 pp variables. Each handicapper was asked to indicate, first, what he considered to be the five most important items of information-the variables he would isolate if he had to choose only five. Each was then asked to select the 10, 20, and 40 most important variables. Next, the handicappers were given real-race data (whiting out the names of the horses and identifications of the races) for 40 past races. They were asked to rank the top five horses in each race. Each handicapper was given the data in increments of the 5, 10, 20 and 40 variables he had judged as most important. In other words, the handicapper had to evaluate each race four times--once with each of the four different levels of information. For each forecast, each handicapper assigned a value from 0 to 100 percent to indicate degree of confidence in the accuracy of his handicapping. When the handicappers' picks were compared with the actual results of these 40 races, it became evident that the average accuracy of selections remained the same regardless of how much information had been available to the handicapper. Three of the handicappers actually showed less accuracy as the amount of information increased, two bettered their record, and three remained unchanged. On the other hand, there was a difference in self-confidence. All expressed steadily increasing confidence in their judgments as more information was given them. With only five items of information, the handicappers' confidence was fit well with their accuracy, but they became overconfident as they received additional information. Even in medicine, experiments to examine the mental processes of medical doctors in diagnosing illness found little relationship between thoroughness of data and accuracy of diagnosis. Students of medicine whose self-described research strategy stressed thorough collection of information (as opposed to formation and testing of hypotheses) were significantly below average in the accuracy of their diagnoses. It seems that the explicit formulation of hypotheses directs a more efficient and effective search for information.This all suggests that creative analysis is as important, if not more, than amount of information. Too much information, in fact, might lead to confusion. Could this be a lesson for our Breeders' Cup analysis?

TRAINER NOTE
About two years ago, we mentioned that certain trainers, who could be classified among the "supertrainers", had the talent of laying low and blending with the woodwork. One of the names we mentioned was the midwest rider Chris M. Block. I remember that well because I did a typo and wrote "Brock".I also mentioned that he excelled on turf.Brocktracking. In any case, in his first 100 rides at Arlington this summer, Block was above 20 percent winners with a flat-bet profit, due in part to an unbelievable average mutuel of about $11.00. And, he continued to excel with grass horses. It seems as if midwest bettors are less likely to use the trainer as a primary factor, than, say, New Yorkers or Californians. Hugh Robertson is another midwest trainer who manages to go whole meets with a flat-bet profit and high average mutuel, though he seems to prefer dirt horses over grass runners.Simulcast bettors who favor trainer betting might wish to zero in on the midwest.