Mark Cramer
C & X Report

CONTENTS
NEW THOUGHTS ON THE BIG PLUNGE: Don’t rush to judgment on a “negative” drop
WHY DO WE INSIST? A review of Six Secrets of Successful Bettors
ELEGANT INFORMATION
BOOK REVIEW: Bruno de Julio on Workouts: Exposing the Mystery
SUSAN SWEENEY AND THE OTHER 8 PERCENT
ANOTHER COMET
THE PATTERN MATCH
WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE TOMLINSON NUMBERS?
C&X CAFE

NEW THOUGHTS ON THE BIG PLUNGE
Don’t rush to judgment on a “negative” drop
On 14 July at Canterbury, number 8, NILINI, showed all the characteristics of a negative drop. Only a year ago, the filly had raced successfully in Minnesota bred stakes races. After a long layoff “announced” a problem of condition, Nilini came back on the Hawthorne grass and ran evenly at 25,000 open company. She then raced in a statebred handicap, a dirt sprint at Canterbury, and made no move from the back of the pack, passing three tired horses to finish seventh in a field of 10, 14 lengths behind the winner.
Now came the first drop, to 20,000 open company at Canterbury, where she showed an identical no-move running line, finishing seventh by 17 lengths. Ugh.
Then came a real plunge, to the 10,000 level, a grass route, where she made a mild mid-race move from tenth by 10 lengths to seventh, six lengths behind, until she wilted to finish ninth in a field of 10, 12 lengths behind the winner.
The real plunge came on 14 July, where she entered in a 6-furlong dirt event for only 4,000, with the conditions of non-winners of a race in 2005.
If there were even a text-book illustration of a negative drop, this was it. In fact, when I first looked at this filly, I noted that this could be a classic bad-drop illustration for C&X readers. But I had to handicap this race for the Canterbury TV audience, so I considered the context. I had already heard from several trainers that a big plunge is sometimes used as a confidence builder, and the trainer figures that his rival colleagues will see it as a negative drop and won’t claim the horse. Sometimes they have no choice but to drop a horse, with a contradictory blend of negative and positive intentions.
Allow me to narrate the context of the race in question so as to avoid occupying scarce space past performances. Remember the conditions: non-winners of a race in 2005, which is a period of six and a half months at this race date.
I’ll only use horse names when dealing with a real contender. We’ll apply the “short form” strategy (a reprint of which is available at my website, www.altiplanopublications.com, for those who subscribed after that article was published or others who may have trashed the issue to exorcise a losing streak).
#1 had just lost two races at this same bottom-of-the-Canterbury-barrel level, and before then had strung together six losses at a lower 2,500 level at Fonner. Proven loser to lesser. TOSS.
#2 had lost a single Cby race at today’s level after having lost several at cheaper fairs. 3% rider / 5% trainer. Proven loser and no-win trainer-rider combo. TOSS.
#3 had strung together three losses at today’s lowly level and had lost others before then for 3,500 at Beulah and had 0 percent trainer and 0 percent rider. TOSS.
#4 MUIR EIREANN, one of the three favorites, was coming back after a 10 ½ month layoff, and was dropping from 15,000, with a high percentage trainer. However, this trainer’s stat showed two races with similar layoffs, both losses. You could have considered that the drop here was equally negative as that of NILINI. Given the poverty of the field, MUIR EIREANN had to be retained as a contender, but was going to be overbet.
#5 was another proven loser with four consecutive losses at this bottom level, and three more prior losses at a cheaper track. Automatic TOSS.
#6 was a proven loser to lesser, having strung three straight losses at 2,500, two of them at the non-winners-of-1-in-2005. TOSS.
#7 had three straight losses at this same Cby basement level, all of which were at least 10 lengths behind. 4% rider / 0% trainer. Easy TOSS.
#8 NILINI. We have already discussed this class plunger and retained her. She has a 23 percent trainer and the leading rider!
#9 TROUBLE N BEANTOWN. This is anther of the favorites, getting the action thanks to a second-place finish at today’s level. However, by the short-form method, this horse is a proven loser, with four straight losses at the 4,000 nw1-for-the-year level! Furthermore, this horse shows an 0-for-12 record at Canterbury Park. TOSS;
#10 has lost three at this level and has a 6 percent rider with a 3 percent trainer. Yet another easy TOSS.
#11 has lost three at today’s level and has a trainer who 0 for 54 this year. How many no-win horses can be collected in a single race? TOSS this one for the same reasons.
#12 HONORABLE FEELINGS is making a more reasonable class drop, has early speed, and has the highest recent Beyer figures. However, the “short form” method tells us to throw out horses with no-win trainer-rider combinations. The trainer is 0 for 21 at the meet and 1 for 27 overall. The jockey has a 7 percent record in 247 starts.
No need to name these riders and trainers. No need to rub it in. But no need to bet them. TOSS, based on the stat.
Where does that leave us? Do we have a choice? The all-important context of no-win horses and no-win stables screams that the class plunger with the big trainer and rider makes sense. In effect, he’s dropping to the bottom of the barrel, but most of the other fillies and mares here are beneath that bottom!
NILINI is going from turf to dirt. She’s 3 for 15 on the dirt and 0 for 3 on the grass. Her trainer Mac Robertson has a 3-for-10 record with the turf-to-dirt move, with an 18 percent profit on that move. The filly is also 3 for 14 on the Canterbury dirt. Her Beyer ratings from a year ago top the recent Beyers of the rest of the pack.
She has everything going for her except that huge uncertainty: the formless horse that is taking a big plunge in class. It’s the negative drop that the Text Book tells us is a throwout.
But in this case, it’s not the Text but the ConText that gives her every right to rediscover her courage when facing her inferiors.
I could have been wrong. I could have been embarrassed by picking this horse on TV. Surely there was at least a 50 percent chance that she’d race like a bag lady. But the other 50 percent of the equation called for optimism.
She raced in last place for much of the race, and the Text Book was looking like the deterministic truth. Then she started passing horses and finally she got up (or they tired and hung).
“She’d have never won if they had not backed up,” one colleague noted.
“True,” I said. “But precisely the formula for her improvement was related to the impoverished nature of the rest of the field.”
She paid $11.60 to win.


WHY DO WE INSIST?
BOOK REVIEW: Six Secrets of Successful Bettors by Frank R. Scatoni and Peter Thomas Fornatale, $24.95, published by Daily Racing Form.

Many of the mistakes we make, in how we choose a horse, how we manage our money, and how we manage ourselves are made evident to us in numerous ways: a handicapping book we’ve read, our own reflections, and even the words of a wife (or husband) who knows our idiosyncrasies. Yet we keep insisting on the same old ways.
Dick Mitchell, not included among 26 professional bettors (most of them horseplayers) featured in Six Secrets, has made the point about the struggling horseplayer who brags about his 20 years of experience when essentially he has one year of experience, repeated 20 times.
The professional players in Six Secrets have an accumulated experience of 400 years of intense and critical horsebetting experience. They have learned to change with the times and have discovered new tricks along the way. They represent, for the most part, the 1 percent of players who have been capable of carrying on with a most difficult game in a profitable way over long periods of their lives.
At first I was skeptical about this book. C&X has used a similar approach in profiling players and asking them to respond to probing questions. In fact, six of the featured players in Six Secrets, have been profiled in C&X (Davidowitz, Fotias, Free, Gutfreund, Meadow, and Quinn), and we’ve done in-depth interviews with numerous others who could have easily qualified to be in Six Secrets (Bain, Brohamer, De Julio, Fierro, Klein, Labriola, Litfin, Mitchell, Sweeney and many others). These guys can do everything for you except pick a horse. Is there any advice from these guys that would have led to our picking the winner of the 2005 Kentucky Derby? That’s a sample of the skeptical questions I asked when beginning this book.
We don’t get secrets but we do get a wealth of wisdom
My main doubt concerned the word “secrets”. There are no secrets in this book. The advice of these mainly successful players has been available to us in numerous sources, and I doubt that C&X readers will be surprised by anything said with the book. My guess is that the word “secrets” was strictly a marketing decision.
In effect the six “secrets” are the six realms of professional play that the two authors synthesized from the wealth of testimony of the interviewed players. The word wealth is not hyperbole. This book is rich in wisdom, and I would hope that the sheer volume of conclusions derived from critical experience will have a good degree of positive effect on C&X readers.
I’m sure that the DRF will not object to my giving away the six “secrets” since these are concepts that have been often reiterated often in the pages of C&X. First, horsebetting should be treated as a business, with the player as entrepreneur. Second, we must process information in an elegant way (handicapping factors and how to use them). Third, only bet when you have value. Fourth, manage money for maximum benefit. Fifth, the handicapper must be introspective and handicap his own betting psychology. Sixth, emotions and money should be handled by focusing on decisions and not outcomes, with record keeping as an underlying structure.
Well, you see? No surprises. Not for C&X readers. And yet, I believe this is one of the most important books on horse betting in recent years. Within each of these secrets, the featured players contradict each other on numerous occasions, and the wisdom of the authors is to have successfully extracted a worthy synthesis.
As you would expect, a good number of the internal contradictions are found within the information processing chapter. One area where the disagreement is tantamount is the role of the trainer. Some of the featured players continue to treat fundamental factors (speed, pace, form, class) as primary, such as James Quinn and Brad Free. But Paul Braseth happens to coincide with the C&X view on the trainer factor, when he notes that even though trainer data is now readily available, “...the trainer angle is something that a lot of people aren’t very comfortable with. They like numbers. They like figures. This [trainer factor] is a little too esoteric for a lot of people, even big players, so there’s still an edge there.”
The fact that six Secrets is free wheeling with contradictions is one of it’s strong points. The “secrets” do not represent simplistic answers.
Value and a Personal Odds Line
To give you an idea of how the feature handicappers may diverge but how the authors synthesize, I’ll refer to one section of the book in detail, that of value. Essentially there are three points of view represented.
The dominant opinion is represented by Beyer, who does not make “a formal value line” because he’s been handicapping long enough so that value is “more or less instinctual”. Crist agrees with Beyer and doesn’t “know a single horseplayer whose entire game consists of betting 4-1 shots who should be 3-1. That’s a brutally rigorous way to play.” [C&X has profiled Steve Fierro, who does indeed proceed with such rigorous insistence.]
The Fierro point of view is represented in Six Secrets by Roxy Roxborough. “Whenever I handicap a race, I assess a price for each horse; I make ... an odds line and I use it as a gauge for betting.” Cary Fotias echoes: “Always put a price on a horse’s head – and only bet when you’re getting a couple of odds levels better.”
C&X readers will have noted that I have attempted to straddle these two opinions, depending on the forum for my handicapping. However, I never make a bet without value, and espouse the written odds line, unless I am absolutely sure that the horse I fancy will be an overlay. In the Desert Boom Claiming Crown race, not having written out an odds line probably steered me away from betting a low-priced overlay, though as I explained, I have my reasons for not playing in the low-odds range.
The third point of view on odds lines in Sox Secrets is perhaps the reason why this is an excellent book and not just a good one. It is the brutal honesty of the self-critical professional. Says Jim Mazur:
“I don’t make a value line and I really should. I will do it intuitively, but not for every horse ...
I don’t have time to sit there and make a real value line for every horse, but you should.”
“You should”, he declares. The first two points of view represent a selected elite. But Mazur’s is directed at all of us. He is us.
Yet another nuance on the same subject is covered by the legendary Ernie Dahlman. Line making is intuitive for Dahlman. “It’s becoming more difficult,” he says, “because I see more and more numbers changing at the last minute.” And it is here that Dahlman corroborates a suspicion I had raised in Kinky Handicapping (now out of print) and the old C&O about the toteboard, which I now cannot resist revisiting. I had advised you to watch the early action because it represents one of the best ways for the high roller to hide his action and at the same time dissuade players from the horse he likes. Dahlman, we now discover, was one of those high rollers I was referring to. He explains:
“Sometimes I’ll bet $2,000 to win on a horse when the window opens at a smaller track and the analyst they have will say, ‘Wow, this horse is 1-9, there’s no value there’...”
Dahlman knows that the odds will rise significantly because (a) he’s finished with the pool, and (b) because so many players will be convinced to look elsewhere because of the horribly low odds. [See commentary on a Richard Matlow winner later in this issue which provides another piece of evidence on the early action pattern.]
The diverse opinions of these professions are especially highlighted in their preferences for handicapping methods or factors, and space does not allow us to give fair representation for the discussion that takes place in the book. But after that discussion we can surely agree with the authors that, with such a wealth of information out there, we must learn to process it elegantly, and we could also add, in a contrarian way, as illustrated by the comment of tournament pro Dave Gutfreund on the Beyer figs.
“The best bets that you can make ...,” he says, “are when you have a horse with a lower Beyer number than another horse in the race but you think is going to run better than the one with the higher number.” Gutfreund aptly notes that the crowd sees the higher fig, and that is usually incorporared in the way the crowd bets, rarely leaving us an edge.
Record Keeping
There are a few sections of the book in which all the pros seem to agree. In the section on the importance of handicapping oneself (knowing one’s strengths and weaknesses in both handicapping and betting psychology), there is unanimous agreement that it is absolutely necessary to keep records of all bets.
According to the authors, in their synthesis of all 26 pro players on record keeping:
It’s the last and most crucial step in being honest with yourself. And if you’re going to be a winning player, you need to be honest with yourself and keep records.
Several of the pros note what C&X has often advised: that it is not simply a betting ledger you need to keep, but also the reasons why you made all bets.

SIDEBAR: NEW OFFER FOR THOSE WHO RENEW SUBSCRIPTION BEGINNING WITH C&X 23

Any C&X reader who has resubscribed for a new round will have the option of sending me his/her betting records for a period of 40 or more consecutive races, including amount, type of race, return and reasons for each bet. I will then send you my personal analysis of how you can improve your play. This is our way of helping players as individuals, knowing that each player must carve his own path. It’s free consulting. I’ll give more details on this offer in our next issue, including my mailing address, because I can only do this with hard copy, though I will return my comments via e-mail. A number of winning players have given me credit for having helped them to surmount obstacles, and my teaching skill, especially my ability to discern the needs of the individual player, is my specialty.

These same pros all refer in one way or another to betting discipline and the ability to pass races as a primary necessity for beating the races. Some argue that action bets of much smaller amounts can help them to keep attentive and follow the races more acutely, while others, notably Barry Meadow, call for excluding all action bets, and suggest that the player can watch a race more objectively when he has no horse in it.
In summary, I highly recommend Six Secrets of Successful Bettors, not only because I feel personally vindicated by it’s general values, but also because I believe that you, the reader, can greatly benefit by the cumulative effect of so many years of professional experience from a richly diverse cross section of successful players.
My only criticism (and I recognize that obligatory editorial choices must be made) is that Ed Bain and Susan Sweeney were not included, simply because they represent two very different approaches to professional betting. However, that’s a small criticism, since the book not only presents positive models for us (the players) but also shows the world at large that horse betting is a legitimate intellectual pursuit and a great challenge that can give reason to life.
“It [horse betting] remains the most intellectually challenging of all gambling games,” writes Beyer, who adds that “there are few things more fun and challenging. That’s the reason that people like me are hooked for life.”

ELEGANT INFORMATION
If this is an information game, how can we expect to have an edge when all the information is readily available to all the other horseplayers, who represent our competition? In Six Secrets there’s reference to “using information elegantly”. With information overload, it’s relatively easy for the public, or for large bettors within the public, to get confused and lose priorities. The elegant use of information is the establishing of a hierarchy of facts and figures that differs from the way the public ranks these pieces of information.
Contradictory information
Furthermore, with so much information out there, there are bound to be intrinsic contradictions, and the player will have to think hard and long about finding the real priority of facts and figures.
I would like to refer to a recent race from Deauville in France which illustrates a universal information dilemma, entirely applicable in the USA, Canada or anywhere else on the globe. It was the usual large field, 17 horses, and to have an idea of how contentious this race was, consider that the betting favorite was 4-1 and the next lowest odds were 7-1. (If you like big fields and high odds, then this is your cup of tea.)
The horse-for-course factor
Everyone in the grandstand and the race book knows which is the horse for course. The DRF prints this information. In the good old missing-information days, those of us who kept records on horse for course capitalized handsomely. That’s because the info was not available in the pps. I would collect this information, and had huge stacks of racing forms in my garage. My “garage bets” were among the best. How life has changed!
But have we lost the edge? Often, there is no longer an edge with this factor. If a horse is 2-for-19 lifetime and 2-for-3 at today’s track, then he is 0 for 16 at all other tracks. The contrast is significant, and everyone should be able to see it. The edge is lost if the horse seems sharp today. But if his recent races are horrendous, the average player will decide that horse-for-course must be secondary and that the poor form is primary. It is in such a situation where we still have an edge.
In the Deauville race, the 10-horse Royal Puck’r was mentioned as the only one in the field to have won at Deauville.
But if you saw the pps, you wondered whether this one piece of information could get Royal Puck’r over the top. In his most recent race, at a different track, he’d been trounced at 44-1 by seven horses in today’s field. In his second to last race, he was near the back of the pack, beaten by three of today’s competitors.
Ditto for his third to last race, at Longchamp, where he finished seventh at 14-1, distanced by three of today’s starters.
I must confess that I do not always have the balls to play a horse like this one, mainly because I find it difficult to establish a clear hierarchy of factors. Using information elegantly means weighting that information in a clever way. For Royal Puck’r, I needed some other piece of information that would help me establish the right priorities.
You had to go 13 races back in Royal Pucker’s pps to find his Deaville victory. The French racing form, Paris-Turf, does that work for us, publishing earlier pps if they relate to today’s scenario. So I could see that Royal Puck’r’s Deauville win was at today’s mile distance and that he’d defeated two of horses that subsequently defeated him at a different track.
Now it was looking better. But there was another information hurdle. His Deauville race was on a heavy turf course. What about today’s course?
I learned that the surface was listed as very soft, thanks to showers that had pelted Deauville the previously days.
And then, the missing piece of information was uncovered. The smart trainer Tony Clout was quoted as saying that he had recently purchased Royal Puck’r. Surely he must have been anticipating the Deauville meet. Why else would he have bought a seemingly hopeless horse?
Clout’s next words seemed prophetic.
“I was waiting for the softening of the surface to present him in competition; like many sons of Bering, he has a preference for the soft going.”
Had I not read Clout’s statement, I might not have backed the horse. But the pattern match of horse for course / horse for surface was evident, and even with no trainer quote, we still knew that the horse had been purchased for this meet.
In retrospect, I may have made a decision-making error. I played Royal Puck’r with a unit to win and three units to show (placé). (They have no place wagering in France.) I considered using him in three-horse quinellas with the top two betting favorites, but those horses did not seem all that special to me.
Royal Puck’r got off slowly and galloped in last place, going three and four horses wide on the only turn, and then finding no hole to get through for the stretch drive. His rider final took a chance and wedged through a small opening and the horse began to fly. It was a pretty scene, and I remember thinking at the moment that this is a beautiful game, even if he does not get up on time. I recalled the stretch drives of the old claimer Maxwell G at Sportsmans Park.
Royal Pick’r did get up, but it was a few yards after the finish line. He was by far the best horse here, but he finished in third place. I collected the equivalent of 11.00 to show and had 75 percent of my investment in the show hole.
Strangely, the 4-1 favorite had finished first and the 7-1 second favorite was second. The 3-horse quinella (called the “triple”) in which you need to pick the top three in any order, paid off 125-1, largely due to the presence of the 19-1 Royal Puck’r in third place.
The elegance of Royal Puck’r weaving through a crowd and then sweeping past a dozen other horses in the final 200 yards was both visual (the colorful silks with the lush green background) and intellectual (the exquisite information that led to this beautiful performance).
And this, my friends, is the true beauty of horse racing. It is not the spectacle alone and not alone the incredible struggle to uncover information elegantly. It is the synchronicity of exquisite information with the elegant flow of magnificent animals and their human guides.
Don’t let anyone tell you that we no longer have an information game because virtually everything is published and available to all players. There is so much information out there that interpreting it elegantly has become increasingly difficult.

BOOK REVIEW:
BRUNO ON WORKOUTS: EXPOSING THE MYSTERY
In reading Bruno De Julio’s workout reports, I’ve always sensed that the man could write. He is able to say a lot in a few words and be entertaining at the same time, within obvious editorial constraints.
Therefore, it comes as no surprise that De Julio’s Bruno in Workouts: Exposing the Mystery is a highly entertaining book. Any expert on pedagogy will tell you that learning is much more effective when it’s packaged in an enjoyable way.
I’ve only met Mr. De Julio once, and that was briefly. However, I can tell you in advanced that I enter this review with a certain prejudice in favor of the book, for I have learned from him how incredibly difficult it is to identify horses on the spot, clock various workouts simultaneously, day after day, extract useful knowledge from split-second flashes, and still keep cool about things. That’s why I volunteered the following comment for the back cover of his book:
“I never really saw horses until I saw them through Bruno’s eyes. For understanding how a thoroughbred ran and can run, he has true vision.”
In order to engage in the daily multi-tasking of clocking and analyzing workouts, you need to have enormous self-confidence, you need to be visually talented, and you need enormous self-confidence. Mr. De Julio has great respect for his own abilities, and yet he also has a humorous way of putting himself down when he deserves it. Helping him through the sunrise grind is the fact that he loves the magnificence of race horses and contributes to their wellbeing when they are retired.
As a horseplayer himself, De Julio also believes that we deserve to have all the information that is available. Combining science and art, he has made a career of providing us with information that is either not available (unpublished works or how a horse really looked when working) or has been distorted (inaccurate official work reports).
In this volume of 220 pages he shows us how works get lost in the shuffle (and it’s usually not a conspiracy) and how clockers fail to read a work accurately. Less energetic clockers click on their stop watch at a pole, but when Bruno sees works beginning between poles, he has a method for clocking them from where they really begin, as with Smarty Jones:
“He was let loose from the pony a few yards from the 5 ½ pole, and he immediately broke into full stride. I didn’t wait for him to hit a conventional pole to start timing. I am not a conventional guy. Smarty Jones isn’t either, and he ripped a very strong opening quarter from almost a standing start.”
He watched Smarty drive through a small hole between the rail and a workhorse, and such observations are worth more than a numerical account of the work. “In two strides he blew past the other horse like he was merely batting an eyelash.”
Even if you were to never read a De Julio clocking report, Bruno on Workouts would help you to understand what you do not really learn when you read the DRF published works, and we pick up insights that can help us read between the lines of DRF reported works and make intelligent deductions. That said, I could also make a case for Bruno dependency, for his reports provide vital description of how a horse worked, and sometimes even unmask gross inaccuracies. Such was the case with a horse named Crowning Caper, who was clocked with a slower time than his workmate. De Julio’s report on Crowning Caper noted:
“Definitely the better of the two Duttons. This one outworked Alaqua Legacy easily, but strangely got the slowest time [in the official clocking]. He was much the best in 11.4 and 22.4. Five lengths better than workmate.”
The debut horse Crowning Caper had “won” the workout, and proceeded to win his debut race, paying $8.60.
On the theme a first-time starters, De Julio first refers to a Jim Cramer-Barry Meadow study of 175,624 debut horses that shows 14,879 wins for an 8.5% win rate and a horrendous return of 68 cents on the dollar, far worse than random betting. Without discrediting the research, De Julio goes on to show us that first-timer bets should be evaluated on an individual basis, and can be profitable, depending on our knowledge of how the horse looked when he worked, how he was schooled in the gate, whether or not he has what the author calls “the power step” out of the gate, how he finished off after the official work was complete, what horses he worked with, and numerous other nuances that go unpublished in the pps.
For years I have argued that broad-brush research on any factor will always show a horrendous loss. After all, it is not the general set but the well-defined subset that determines a winning handicapping factor.
No book review would be complete without some kind of disagreement. In the section on first-time starters, De Julio gives us a fascinating description of the varying talents of Southern California trainers with first-time starters, compiled by Rich Lochner and Today’s Racing Digest. The study tells us how many debut winners each trainer had between January 2000 and April 2005, including the odds range of these winners.
What is missing is the number of debut starters for each trainer. We need only compare Richard Matlow to any high-profile trainer. Matlow had eleven debut winners in that period, in spite of a lengthy dry period, but he has far fewer starters than Mandella, Drysdale or the other designer trainers.
Since the trainer debut hose research period mentioned in the book, Matlow has had two more bingos. What is striking is that Richard Matlow only races a few horses each year. Mandella is one of the best in the business for firing with a first timer, but I am reasonable sure that Matlow’s long-term roi is far better than Mandella’s.
De Julio confirms what we had previously suggested in years gone by: that Matlow is a no-play at Del Mar, and does especially well at Hollywood Park. In spite of the weakness of the original study he refers to, De Julio knows what he’s writing about and accurately notes that “Matlow is a master”.
In California, gate works are required of debut horses, but that doesn’t mean they must be published. If the clocker doesn’t see the work or fails to identify the horse, then the gate work goes unpublished, as was the case of Matlow’s debut horse, Castleonthehudson, who returned $16.00 after having opened at 3-1 [the early-action/drift-up factor so often referred to in C&X].
Let’s refer to another De Julio example of how the long-term stat on debut horses is meaningless when compared to the reality of the individual horse. There was Marie’s Rose, the first-timer who paid $35.40. Going into that race, De Julio had three workout commentaries, including language like:
“...caught the eye and finished strongly”
“...floated home without being asked in 58.4 breezing. Looked very good.”
The DRF published work had 59.2h. That means that not only did De Julio clock it faster but his interpretation of the difference between “breezing” and “handily” contradicted that of the official track clocker. (De Julio offers us a few pages on the real differences between “breezing” and “handily” and how such designations vary not only from one clocker to another but from one racing circuit to another.)
Back to the whole idea of the Jim Cramer/Barry Meadow first-timer research, surely any meaningful research, beyond mindless numbers crunching, would have to separate first-timers by workouts, trainers, and pedigree. I’m willing to wager that if you took the subset of debut horses which receive glowing comments in De Julio’s workout reports, you’d end up with a significantly better hit rate and return on investment than the Meadow-Cramer study.
Not only can we make money by integrating positive De Julio comments into our handicapping but we can save money by heeding his negative comments. Such was the case with a filly that everyone in the grandstand knew would be the lone speed in the race, by the name of Miss Santa Ana. Miss Santa Ana had defeated a poor field of maidens and earned a high figure while going wire to wire.
Using the numbers, most handicappers charted her as the lone-front runner in her next race, and she was heavily bet. However, De Julio had noted that Miss Santa Ana lacked the “power step” from the gate, and having drawn the difficult rail at Santa Anita, she would have to work harder and lose steam to get the lead, and thus be vulnerable in the late going. Such was the case and De Julio made money on the race.
Bruno on Workouts is replete with enjoyable and sometimes humoristic anecdotes, each with its lesson. He shows us that he’s not only an accomplished horse observer but also a writer with style. The author sees connections and relates a wide variety of subjects to his core theme, including trainer, jockey, owner, medication, pedigree, grass horses, claimers, shippers, hype, betting, and other treats. The book sells for $29.95, with a dollar from each purchase going directly to the California Equine Retirement Foundation. See www.racingwithbruno.com

EXCERPTS FROM PREVIOUS C&X INTERVIEW WITH BRUNO DE JULIO

C&X. Please tell our readers a little about how you got into racing. Did you have any difficult choices in deciding on your current profession? Have you done any TV commercials for alarm clock companies?
BDJ. How I got into racing? I remember listening to the races from Agnano, the Italian racetrack in my hometown in Napoli, Italia where I was born and raised for the first twelve years of my life. I got on pony, the spring kind, and rode like a madman. I had a good left hand stick if you'd ask me. I didn't get into the races until twelve years later when a girlfriend took me to Del Mar and I watched my first head and head battle down the lane. I fell in love, which ended costing me my girlfriend, but retained racing for life. As far as a current profession? I was a District Investigator for Carter-Hawley Hale and Pillsbury companies, which at that time owned Broadway and Mervyns/Target stores. I used to take the Form to work and sneak off to Hollywood Park for lunch. I began my career working at the track buying a couple of cheapies, and going to the stables every morning before work, and watching them gallop, work and then hotwalk them for trainer Jack Haynes. I was hands on with my own horses. I have felt the notches of a beginning of a bowed tendon.... That's how I learned to clock from watching my horses. I also was a handicapper and then became a workout analyst. Have I done any TV commercials for alarm clock companies? I had one but I slept through it.

C&X. Do trainers ever go up to you after a workout and ask you how their horse looked?
BDJ. Yes, I have a couple of standard answers: `` With both eyes!``, and the other one is: ``what did you want from the work?``. My favorite trainer story and we will keep the horseman's name out, but after a cheap claimer worked in 50 and change for a 1/2 mile the trainer approached me and asked: ``How fast did you get my horse?`` I replied the time, and he looked at me and asked: `` is that a good time today?``, just as the horse was walking past us bleeding from the nostrils. True story. I am not one to ask a trainer who their horses are but rather tell them, thus, if they are thinking of B.S.ing me they might think twice about it first.
C&X. Some years ago, when I was hanging around SA, I experimented with your workout reports by tallying a flat-bet record of certain of your commentaries. For example, horses that continued on for a furlong beyond the officially clocked workout distance. Another example: horses that worked in company vs. a superior stablemate. I tallied periods of profit, but alas, it was difficult to gather a large enough sample for any individual type of workout commentary.
BDJ. Has anyone ever researched your commentaries in a methodical way?If anyone researched my commentaries they might come to the conclusion I need to be commited. Seriously, I react to the way the horse worked and how I am writing that day. For example, I have my notes all in my book. They resemble hieroglyphics on an Egyptian pyramid, and I look at the races the horse is entered in and write it accordingly. It is all written from intuition. You will find no pattern, and the simplest thing of all, if you read, you know who I like. It is simple as that. READ and you shall know to the tee. If I say it's OK, then it's just OK. If I say awesome, wow, great, superb, you would have to think I like the work. Some put too much of an analytical spin on my comments. READ and you shall be saved, my son!

C&X. For about 15 years I've been following Richard Matlow. He's profitable with first-time starters. It seems as if the slower he works 'em, the better. Is he hiding something? Any idea about what his secret may be?
BDJ. Remember, Matlow trains at Hollywood Park and those times can be skewed if you are trying to view them as comparable to Santa Anita's blistering morning surface. Matlow has been a pretty easy read in the morning. If they can run they show it. As far as his secret? It's Hollywood Park. A Matlow trained first timer that has trained exclusively at Del Mar or Santa Anita is an immediate throw out. If the horse has trained at Hollywood Park, well, you could run to the windows. The latter example is by far the least and most obscure trainer pattern available. I make money on knowing just who is training where and with whom.

C&X. Is there any particular category of race for which specialist workout commentaries are most necessary. Baby races? Broken down claimers?
BDJ. Baby races is gate speed, gate speed, gate speed. Especially early in the two-year-old season, March through July, and then after that 5f to 6f works are the tell tale. Any horse including my grandparents, may god rest their soul in peace, can go a quick half, but the dividing factor is the 5f to 6f works. Separates the contender and pretender. Broke down claimers? Well, for low level claimers less is more, just like they told me in my first alarm clock commercial. In fact, much less I slept right through. Less is more. I hate to see a low level claimer with a big 5f work. i like them with nothing between or just a half mile tune up.

C&X. Any advice for those who suffer from sleep deprivation? How do you deal with the crazy work hours?
BDJ. I start at 5 am and sometimes am done by 9pm. Sleep deprivation? With the kind of sophisticated alarm clock I have? I can't shut it off. My eyes are wide open at 5 am....every morning. How do I deal with my crazy hours? Well, you would have to ask my ex-wife and my ex-girlfriends.

SUSAN SWEENEY AND THE OTHER 8 PERCENT
In horse racing we can look back at a losing bet, pull up the past performance of the winning horses, and usually find some factor within those pps that could have pointed to a win. This is a remarkably rational game. At least 90 percent of the time, there is some reasonable explanation for a horse’s victory. I’ve calculated 92 percent with subjective analysis. The fact that we often find these explanations after the fact is testimony to the complexity of the infinite puzzles we strive to solve.
But in approximately 8 percent of all races, the victory cannot at all be explained by the past performances. In this article we shall discuss this other 8 percent and then consider ways to deal with it. I have a research collection of inexplicable winners. Let’s look at only a few of them, just for fun.
On 16June04 at Lone Star, Marky’s Man was entered in a dirt sprint for $4,000. He had just lost two identical races, by a combined total of 26 lengths. These two failures were part of a longer losing streak. The only change was a jockey switch from Collier to Cogburn. He won by an easy 2 1/2 at 25-1, with his Beyer fig jumping 12 points. In his next race, same class level, he finished fifth in a field of nine with the same Cogburn aboard.
At Penn National on 2Jun05, Hate Mail was switching from a dirt to a turf sprint. Going into the race he was 0 for 2 on the turf, and he tried a turf sprint one race later at 7/2 and finished out of the money. He’d lost four straight races. On the winning day, with no equipment or rider change, he went off at 12-1 and his Beyer fig jumped 13 points.
Then there was He Does, who did it at 8-1 in a 7-horse field at Santa Anita on 11Mar05, for a little known trainer. This was a maiden claimer for 25,000. He Does had lost his three maiden claiming races as a four your old, finishing second in one of them after having blown a clear lead. He Does looked a little better than the above two winning dogs, but he was coming back as a 5-year-old maiden at the exact same level, with a 6 percent rider. In retrospect, we could say that trainer E G Burnison is Mr. Longshot, but at the time, we had no trainer stat on this guy.
Well, we could go on and on with inexplicable winners, but let me propose a learning experience. Go through your old past performances and look at each winner above 20-1. Each time, scan that winner’s earlier pps for clues. You will be surprised that at about 92 percent of the time, you will find some explanation, thin as it may be, for the horse’s victory. You will also discover that at major racing circuits and/or higher class levels you are less likely to find these inexplicable winners.
Does that mean we should only play the major circuits? Not necessarily, for at the big race tracks, big money bettors are more active and finding an exceptional overlay is slightly more difficult.
Serial killers
In Six Secrets, Quinn mentions that after his initial success with rolling pick threes, it became increasingly difficult to make a killing with this type of bet. Quinn’s handicapping is based on logic. All too often, the logical choices, and even the logical longshots, were covered by the public and big bettors among them so that payoffs no longer compensated for the risk that was taken. On Pick 3s and Pick 4s, Beyer, another rational handicapper, comments:
“...in a series of races, it is seldom, if ever ... where you’re going to have ironclad convictions in all three or four. You’re going to be guessing. ... That’s why my preference is to bet individual races where I’ve got a strong insight into that race.”
If we understand that about 8 percent of all races result in irrational winners, then Beyer’s conclusion makes tons of sense.
So what do we do with the other 8 percent of races, those that will offer no rational conclusion? In serial bets, if Susan Sweeney has a strong insight into the other legs, then she’s willing to go with the ALL. Before you accuse her of taking wild swings, consider that she follows careful steps in her handicapping and reasoning process, according to my interpretation of her writing. [See her Signers or her video for a direct report from the primary source.]
The required first step is to feel that she has a solid insight in all but one leg of the serial wager.
The necessary second step is to identify the missing leg as an anything-can-happen race. In other words, she has handicapped the race to be irrational. For her, that type of handicapping is just as important as picking the winner in another leg of the bet. Once you know that a race will very possibly explode the toteboard, then the ALL will give you the longshot winner in a way that maximizes the leverage.
Susan also knows when not to use the ALL. She’s not going up there and taking wild swings against Nolan Ryan. The ALL is one answer for capitalizing on the other 8 percent. But you cannot be flailing away at something that happens only 8 percent of the time, and only a structured approach is called for, one that can only be put in practice when both conditions are favorable: you have clearly identified a race with a probably irrational outcome and you have rock solid plays in the other legs of the serial wager.

ANOTHER COMET
The De Julio trainer chapter reminded me of so much I’d written about Richard Matlow and his talent with first time starters. He’s the typical small-sample/large-payoff trainer that continues to be profitable over the years. He arrives infrequently, like a strange comet, but flashes his value and then departs. Another trainer whose orbit passes over Southern California is Sam Scolamieri. I worte about Mr. Scolamieri in the 1980s, and Frank Cotolo, an American Turf Monthly columnist, has fond memories of those days when the two of us collected on this virtually unknown trainer.
Scolamieri’s orbit disappears for long periods of time but whenever it shows up, see its light.
One example that does not contradict C&X methodology emerged on 30Aug04, when Mr. S. entered the 50-1 Lite Man in a Del Mar maiden claiming sprint. Not at all in contradiction with the C&X second-time starter research, Lite Man went from a 4 to a 57 Beyer and won by 5 lengths. In his debut race, he had the look of a merry-go-round horse, but in fact, he’d shown a bit of early speed before dropping back to last.
With a winner like this, it’s understandable that Mr. S. shows a huge flat bet profit in various specialty categories, but I’d give a long look at all of his horses, especially those entered on dirt.
As usual, the best bets in Tbred racing are those that rarely arrive in view on rare occasions, like mysterious comets.

THE PATTERN MATCH
Like the best of trainer-comet bets, the true pattern match is a rare occurrence. It is impossible to research because it depends on intuitive reasoning and cannot be reduced to mechanical rules. In fact, pattern recognition may be the highest form of integration between art and science, for it requires both perceptiveness and objectivity.
If there were one thing in common with nearly all pattern matches, it is the overachiever factor. A horse races significantly better than its odds (overachieves) within a certain set of race circumstances, and then, a few races later, these circumstances once again manifest themselves.
Such an occasion arose on 8Jun05 at Belmont in the first race, on the turf. Consider the pps of DECOURCEY, in my abbreviated form that highlights the renewal of overachieving circumstances. (All races listed are Maiden Special Weight, New York statebred.)
Decourcey
8Jun05 1 1/16 TURF Bel ----------------------------------------------------------
25May05 Mile off turf sly Bel. Finished 7th by 39 lengths at 31-1. Beyer 13.
8MayO5 7 ½ dirt Bel. Finished 8th by 31 lengths at 36-1. Beyer 28.
15Apr05 1 1/16 TURF Aqu. Finished 3rd by 4 ¾ at 70-1. Beyer 62.
25Mar05 Mile dirt, muddy Aqu. Finished 11th by 18 lengths at 83-1. Beyer 26.
11Mar05 6f inner dirt Aqu. Finished 6th by 18 Lengths at 49-1. Beyer 26.
15July04 5 ½ f dirt Bel. Fin 7th by 14 lengths at 47-1. Beyer 26.
Clearly, this horse had one good race, and that single good race was his only race on the turf. On June 8 he was coming back to a situation that matched his only good race, which was definitely an overachieving performance; when you finish third at 70-1, you must have done something beyond your expected capabilities! Always with a 28-or-lower Beyer in his previous dirt races, suddenly in his one grass race, his Beyer fig jumped to 62.
You would think this horse would have gotten some betting action, and compared to his previous odds, maybe he did, going off at 12.5/1. But shouldn’t his odds have been lower, given the strong evidence that he would wake up on grass?
As with most strong longshot patterns, the handicapper finds a big nagging snag in the Decourcey profile. Rider J. E. Bermudez had no wins for the meet going into the race, and was a 6 percent rider with a 7 for 118 record for the year.
Snags
There will always be snags in a live longshot profile. Statistically, a no-win trainer is usually a good elimination. Low-percentage trainers have a negative impact value on their longshots, and an embarrassingly low return on investment. Rider stats are less clear. A rider’s numbers depend on the quality of his or her mounts. In this case, the same Bermudez who would lose aboard Decourcey on the dirt by 30 lengths was still able to finish third at 70-1 when racing on the grass.
The race
In a ten-horse field, Decourcey got off in mid-pack, fourth by about five lengths. The three-year-old gelding gradually progressed and was second by a half length in the stretch. He then showed what the Brits call “turn of foot” and accelerated into a victory by more than two lengths. The $27.00 payoff could be considered a beautiful overlay if you agree that the pattern match based on the overachiever angle is a worthy handicapping factor. We cannot put a value on this factor since it’s not researchable. But again and again it pays off.
Tip
Whenever you find a horse with an overachieving effort somewhere in it’s past performances (finish position is much better than the odds warranted), take a look at the scenario of that performance. Was there anything unique about that scenario, based on track, surface, distance, rider, days since last race, or any other “change”. If today there is a change to that precise scenario, then the horse should be seriously considered. Snags will nag, for all longshots have their negative message board that annouces “don’t bet me”. The snag should be measured in relation to the odds. The higher the projected payoff, the less we should allow the snag to drag us out of the race.

WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE TOMLINSON NUMBERS?
My old IRS records from the early and mid-1990s document the signers I caught thanks to the Tomlinson turf numbers. Today, it just isn’t happening. Is it my own malaise or is there something wrong with the figures?
C&X reader Dr. Billy M says it’s the figures and he tells us that they’re virtually useless. The facile answer is that, since these figs are published, they’ve lost their value. But that’s not enough for me. I had a love affair with those numbers and I’d like to know what really soured the relationship. If it had been the public presence alone, then we could toss out virtually every piece of info in the DRF past performances. I’m not sure that the Tomlinson figs are being overbet and I suspected that there’s a more intrinsic problem, so I did some impressionistic research to attempt to find out what is going wrong.
We’ve seen how Decourcey improved 36 Beyer points when moving to the turf, and yet his Tomlinson rating was a mediocre 221. How could this be when his grand sire is Storm Cat, a favorite of Euro turf trainers?
The problem may have been in sire Tomorrow’s Cat’s early record. Who knows, maybe they hooked the sire up with dirt sprinting dams. But if you look into both sire and dam of Decourcey, you find a curious combination of Northern Dancer on both sides. Decourcey’s sire Tomorrow’s Cat gets Northern Dancer from his dad’s side, through Storm Bird, and from his mom’s side, Tomorrow’s Child, through Al Nasr and Lyphard.
Then there is Decourcey’s dam, Shady Princess, whose daddy Shadeed comes from the great turf sire Nijinsky, who in turn comes from Northern Dancer. The mother of Decourcey’s dam was strictly French (read “turf”) breeding, coming from Le Fabuleux.
The Tomlinson number cannot pick up the dam info, nor can it synthesize the match. You’d never know there was Northern Dancer on both sides.
When I used the Tomlinson numbers successfully, as chronicled in the out-of-print Kinky Handicapping, I used the sire number separately from the dam-sire number. The DRF Tomlinson number adds the sire number with half of the dam-sire number, so that the reader has no independent number for the sire. If I saw a strong sire turf number and the dam sire’s number did not look good, I would look up the dam separately in the Bloodstock “phone book”. If not, I would accept the sire number for its intrinsic value, since the half credit for the dam sire is a highly subjective number.
Just for fun, I followed up my Decourcey check with two successful turf runners with blunted Tomlinson numbers. One horse I checked was Dreadnaught, 5 for 12 on the grass at the time I checked, and 0 for 4 on the dirt. The grass wins came at odds such as 9-1 and 5-1, and there was an overachieving second place finish at 42-1.
And yet, the Tomlinson turf number was only 261, with a 300 being the minimum acceptable (in theory).
What I found was that Dreadnaught’s sire Lac Quimet had Northern Dancer on his mom’s side, and that Dreadnaught’s dam Wings of Dreams also got Northern Dancer pedigree from her dad Sovereign Dancer. Once more, there was Northern Dancer lineage on both sire and dam side.
The recent second-time starter turf winner Stock Tip (1Aug) fifth race at Saratoga, paid $110 to win and fit the criteria of the C&X second-time starter research, having come back after a layoff. There was the serious question of the fact that Stock Tip was a mere “merry-go-round” horse in the debut race. Furthermore, Stock Tip had less than the 300 minimum Tomlinson turf rating, at 295. I dug into the pedigree record of Stock Tip and discovered Northern Dancer lineage on the dam side of his sire Thunder Gulch. Stock Tip’s dam was sired by Majestic Light, who has Euro (turf) pedigree.
My conclusion is that the Tomlinson numbers in their DRF format do not tell us what they used to tell us, not giving us a separate number for the sire. There seems to be a powerful turf pedigree factor when we can find Northern Dancer lineage on both sides, or when ND heritage on one side is combined with European pedigree on the other. A few other spot checks of sub-300 Tomlinson ratings for successul turf horses tell me that it’s more complicated than Northern Dancer lineage, but at least we know that the dynamic combinations between sire and dam go beyond the Tomlinson number as it appears in the DRF. If they’d just publish the sire number alone, I think we could find ways of recovering thea Tomlinson edge.
Until then, we’ll have to look up pedigrees. Consider the time involved of looking up the extended pedigree record of each horse in all turf maiden and turf nw1 allowance races!
No wonder that many of the featured handicappers in Six Secrets refer to the work ethic!
PS. Aside from the turf pedigree factor, which is alive and well according to the above findings, the C&X second-time starter research is worth reviewing, especially with the $110 score by Stock Tip. I considered reprinting that article here, but some of you have your back issues, and teh repetition would not be fair to you. I did not want to take space away from other themes. Therefore, the second-time starter research article is reprinted at no charge on my website: www.altiplanopublications.com thus liberating more space in this issue.

C&X CAFE

So Mark, you may be tired of printing stuff from me, but I want to recap how reading your stuff over the years gave me a great start to the Saratoga meeting on opening day.I had entered a contest where I handicapped well but did not win any prize money. However, in preparation for my first DRF contest, I reviewed all my 6 years of C&X reports. When Saratoga opened, I bet on 3 races, utilizing wisdom from those C&X pages:Race 6: The favorite, Guillame Tell, was 6/5 since he was dropping from a 9th place finish in a G-3 event and today was in NW1. Your buddy in Pennsylvania (I believe) looks for these horses to bet against. So I felt better about my 7-1 Fishy Advice, who won nicely.Race 8: Dick Mitchell's theory that horses take turns - Adieu at 6/5 had defeated Folklore by a mere 3 or 4 lengths. I took Folklore at 4-1 and she won going away.Race 9: Nick Kling(whom you have interviewed and respect) wrote an article 2 weeks earlier predicting trainer James Bond had been faring poorly at Belmont, but would probably do well at the SPA. His Blues Highway won at 11-1, capping a late DD for $138.I should be set for the meet. These are a few examples of how it pays to review your stuffperiodically.Dr Billy M
Mark
i wanted to run this by you. It concerns the .10 superfecta bet at Arlington Park on 31 july. on the DRF cover sheet for AP it says: $2 superfecta on all races with at least 7 betting interests. I have a 79 year old race track friend and he bets Paul McGee as part of his ritual. In the first race he keyed McGee's horse (Weatherwise) who won at $12. the 2nd horse was 19-1and the 3rd horse 9/2. the 2-1 2nd choice ran 4th and the 8/5 favorite ran out. There was a late gate scratch negating the super. (the tri paid 710). However, in the 5th race-same scenario 7 horses but with an early scratch making 6 betting interests they paid the superfecta to the tune of $88.80 for $2. I asked them what their rationale was for taking bets on both races, paying off on the 5th and refunding bets on the first. No answer yet. One other thing before i go concerning 2nd time starters. At GP and FG this past winter i bet 15 of them 1 win at $13 and 5 seconds with prices of $30, $14.80 and $20 to place on 3 of them. the conclusion from this short record keeping is that the odds parameters you set for those tracks didn't hold up. what the prevailing factor was is: lay 1 and ship on horses coming down from the north. It seems to be a track specific parameter, for when the horses started going north for the summer the odds parameter was right on. Those 3 place prices are too much to ignore--that's the only reason for bringing this to your attention. You did a good job at Canterbury. Don't be so hard on yourself. That's quite a responsibility you shoulder. Thanks. don a.

Hey Don,
I checked the results charts. It is bizarre. I could imagine that with a late scratch just before post, they might leave the bet, but you say it was a late scratch in the first. Only thing we can do is see if any of our readers were there at the time and heard the PA announcement. More important, regarding the second-timer angle, believe me, this is a great handicapping angle, but when you do research, you have to establish mechanical parameters. The only thing I can say is that we obviously are at the stage where we have an exquisite handicapping insight but no way yet to refine it into an automatic bet. I’ve now done several samples. In one sample, I excluded all horses 50-1 or up, simply because of the infrequency of the winners but not because of any lower expectation. Following that parameter, we’d miss the $110 second-timer at Saratoga on July 31.
To be honest, I’m having a helluva diffult time trying to establish a high resolution parameter for this bet.
Mark

From Bob:
ARE YOU READY FOR MORE ABUSE? i ATTENDED YOUR OLD HAUNT SUNDAY.
(CRACKED CLAW). YOU BETTER KNOW HOW TO OPERATE THE SELF-SERVICE
TERMINALS THERE. MOST OF THE TELLERS HAVE THE DISPOSITION OF AN UN-TIPPED WAITER. YOU HAVE TO INTERRUPT THEM TO PLACE A BET.
YOU PROBABLY HAVEN'T BEEN TO CHARLES TOWN FOR MANY YEARS.
THEY HAVE A HUGH SLOTS CASINO AND SATELLITE BETTING. ARE NOW IN THE PROCESS OF BUILDING A NEW HOTEL TO ACCOMODATE TABLE GAMES. CRAPS, POKER, BLACKJACK ETC. HALF THE CARS IN THE PARKING LOT HAVE MD TAGS.
AM TOLD THEY HAVE AN 0FF-TRACK BETTING FACILITY IN ROANOKE. (TO
ACCOMODATE THE BIBLE BELT)
ALL KINDS OF NEW CONSTRUCTION ON 340. SCHOOLS, CHURCHES, HOUSING.
RESTAURANTS. CHARLES TOWN IS BOOMING. DO I HEAR AN AMEN?
NY, NJ, DEL, W VA, AND NOW PA HAVE SLOTS. MD SORT OF REMINDS ME OF SOUTHERN BAPTISTS. THEY DON'T BELIEVE IN PRE-MARITAL SEX. AFRAID IT
MIGHT LEAD TO DANCING.
REGARDS,
BOB