Mark Cramer
C & X Report

C&X 30

CONTENTS
Editorial
Exotic Wagering: Book Review
Interview with Steven Crist
Horseplayer Blues in C Minor
The Definition of Effort, by Nick Kling
Quantum Jump: a Day at Auteuil
C&X Cafe, including Humor from Bob
End Notes

EDITORIAL
This issue of C&X is dedicated to the “C horse”, the one that has some chance to win but is not considered as a contender. When playing exotics, what do we do with such a horse? Steve Crist has a lot to say about this major dilemma for the horseplayer. He has ways of including C horses on exotic tickets by using such horses with primary contenders on backup tickets. We'll learn a bit about how Mr. Crist does his permutations, and we recommend that you follow up on our summary with a careful reading of his new book.
We follow up on the Crist review with our own take on C horses, in "Horseplayer Blues in C Minor". Surely you can construct a perfect ticket for your pick three or trifecta, but what's the handicapping foundation that got you to manufacture the ticket in the first place? How do you differentiate between a contender and a “maybe” horse?
No issue of C&X is prototypical and this one has its own quirks. In particular we get to partake of Nick Kling's fine horse racing prose. Nick is one of the chosen few who write their selections at night and poetry in the morning. Nick is distinguished for often finishing a whole New York meet with a flat-bet profit when one would bet an equal amount on each and every one of his top picks. We consider Nick one of the best writers in the field, a real overlay thanks to the fact that his columns appear in a less-than-widely distributed newspaper.
I hope the questions we asked Steve Crist have gone beyond the normal platitudes. I tried to throw difficult issues at him, but in the end, Crist is a hero for the horseplayer, having brought strategic information to the pages of the DRF and also having acted as a horseplayer advocate, most notably in successfully lobbying for the 10-cent superfecta. If I have been too much of a nice guy in the interview, I do throw a few jabs in “Horseplayer Blues in C Minor”.
I don't know how long C&X can keep coming up with surprises, but we have a lot of them in store in upcoming issues. Stay tuned. mc

EXOTIC WAGERING:
BOOK REVIEW
A good handicapping book may teach you to be a more perceptive handicapper but not necessarily improve your return on investment. Even a great handicapping book may not do the trick. It is possible to be an expert handicapper and still lose money.
A good book on money management may provide objective information on all types of betting strategies, and yet the player who reads this book might not interiorize the wisdom to the extent that he can make the right betting decisions. A good book on money management may tell you what is right, but we really need something that shows us, in such a way that objective principles become a visceral part of conditioned behavior.
Steven Crist's new book, Exotic Wagering: How to Make the Multihorse, Multirace Bets that Win Racing's Biggest Payoffs (DRF Press, 2006) finds the way to implant the right objective strategies into a place within our betting consciousness. He does this by showing rather than telling, by simplifying instead of engaging in academic gymnastics, and by humanizing instead of simply hitting us on the head with correct strategies.
Crist is the right person to take numbers, statistics and permutations and convert them into something that we can feel and nearly touch. That's because he comes from a background of both verbal and mathematical prowess, from both the sciences and the humanities. Crist is one of those rare human beings who is both cerebral and a man of action.
He had once cerebrally concluded that the Daily Racing Form was missing some of the best information, and he set out to change it all, first by working with a rival publication that forced the DRF to reform, and then by making the bet of a lifetime: purchasing the DRF on credit and then remaking it into our version of the Wall Street Journal and Morningstar combined.
Crist's life of cerebral risk taking can be followed in his Betting On Myself (DRF, 2003), where we find all the ingredients of a lively page turner: engaging story telling, a host of colorful characters, wit and wisdom.
Exotic Wagering is an entirely different project. If we read this book with an open mind, we will discover where our weaknesses in betting strategy lie, and how we may resolve them. In doing profiles of winning players, I often ask the question, “Why do good handicappers get bad results.” In Exotic Wagering we learn one of the most significant reasons. In multi-race and multi-horse exotics, good handicappers are too often underleveraged, all the while they are competing with bigger players who may possibly be less talented but who do not err in the realm of strategy.
This is not to say that a bad handicapper can win money by proper strategies. Crist lets us know that there is an abundance of proficient handicappers but precious few who win money, so he's showing us why.
This is not a sexy book, and yet one senses a numerical eroticism, an elegant equilibrium of numbers and permutations. Even the entirely objective chapter on the mathematics of exotics is a stimulating prerequisite for our being able to act quickly and make the right decisions. Crist was once a jazz pianist, and I sense that in the improvisation of complex decision making, he sees the necessity of adhering strictly to the mathematical harmony of betting.
Crist has earned the credentials to write this book by accumulating a career of successful pick 6 play. As dazzling as Crist's methods are for constructing tickets, they always respect the original harmony he advocates.
That harmony includes deriving the maximum leverage in any exotic ticket by playing the more likely combinations more times than the less likely ones, and by staggering tickets so that the less likely “maybe” horses, what he calls “C horses”, can find a place on the ticket.
Back in the 1990s, I was convinced that I had found a way to play exotics without leverage. I had the winning signers to prove it. I was using the Tomlinson numbers and betting strictly on maiden turf races, using pedigree as my only primary factor.
The profits were real but the sustainability of clean, tight exotic tickets became questionable. Little by little, my methodology was losing its edge. I can blame Crist, for one of his DRF innovations was the “Closer Look” column, where analysts would share comments on turf pedigree in precisely the races I had once been an insider. Then Crist went ahead and published the Tomlinson numbers. Not only were the numbers available to players but even trainers began using them, in order to spot their horses, and I know of trainers who decided to not race their horses on the grass because of their poor Tomlinson turf numbers. That meant fewer field fillers, fewer easy eliminations.
It soon dawned on me that exotics were no longer so easy. Beyond my specialty, all too often I would have two huge longshots in a three-horse or three-race exotic only to get beat out by a low priced “C” horse that I was not able to use because of the cost.
Back in the '90s, on one of the only two occasions I had ever played the twin trifecta, with a partner, we had two live tickets going into the second leg, and got beat for the show by a hanger that had every right to finish third even though he had no chance to win. We had gone into the second leg “naked” because we had been undercapitalized in the first leg.
At Canterbury, two years ago, I had two longshot winners in the first two legs of a pick three and was alive on almost every horse in the last leg, even though I had only used two horses in each race. That was because a number of possible winners of the third leg would result in payoffs for two of three. One of the horses I had used would have given me the whole pool. There were two horses left that I had not used. One of them, a second favorite, a “maybe” horse that I had considered a hanger, won the race, and I ended up with nothing to show for picking two big longshots on my ticket: another case of being underleveraged. Had Crist's book been available at the time, I would have known how to hedge my bet.
Crist covers many themes in this fine book, one of which is the 10-cent superfecta. Crist, an advocate for the horseplayer, had written letters in favor of such a bet and evidently his influence made a difference. In France we have a similar bet called the MULTI, and it is through this bet that I have discovered how much more effective my play can be when I have enough leverage. Like the 10-cent super, the MULTI allows the player to buy smaller portions of the base bet, those allowing him to spread his bet more creatively.
The 10-cent super allows the player to avoid having to sign. In France, big scores are not taxed, so the result is similar. In Crist's Chapter 5, we learn how to deal with the tax man. Crist is both tax advisor and player advocate. Since we are taxed on gross winnings and not net profits, the system is inherently unjust. Crist finishes this finely crafted book by sharing his 10,000 investment into the 2005 Breeders' Cup, play by play, blow by blow. Crist hits the floor several times but gets up and invests with the same confidence. He recovers and eventually triumphs, but it is Uncle Sam who has the last word.
It's a good story, fine writing, and above all, a way of reaching readers so that, if their handicapping is reasonably good, will surely improve their bottom line.
You might think that I am writing this positive review because I find certain affinities in Crist's frames of reference. He refers to one of my favorite recent books, mentioned in C&X, The Wisdom of Crowds, by James Surowicki. He refers to crossword puzzles in relation to handicapping, a relationship that I have noted. And most important, he is an advocate of keeping records, one of the musts for C&X readers.
But aside from these affinities, it's hard to be biased one way or another about this book. Exotic Wagering is based entirely on concrete betting reality and either you accept it or you can defy it and bet at your own risk.

Did You Know...
that we spend so much more time in considering who will win than in thinking how to bet;
that our competition is tougher nowadays because the easy walkovers have now left racing and are playing casino games;
that the only defense of a small player against a deep-pocketed one is to avoid overbet combinations;
that there's more value in the 25% take of a trifecta than in the 15% take in the straight pool, in part, because you are betting on three things ... the first horse has a 15% takeout and the second and third ones only have 5% takeouts;
that by boxing bets, we make no distinction between more worthy and less worthy inclusions;
that in an exotic with 60 possible combinations, the 7 shortest prices account for more than half the pool;
that the favorite in an underneath spot in the tri is an underlay;
that boxing four horses in a tri (1, 2, 3, 4) costs the same as four separate boxes of three horses: 1, 2, 3 / 1, 2, 4 / 1, 2, 5 / 1, 2, 6, but the four boxes give you more horses and allow you to weight those horses in your investment;
that intra-race and inter-race exotics require very different focuses and specialties;
that the single biggest mistake of a pick 4 wagerer is trying to bet with the same resources as with a pick 3.
You can find out more about these and so many other pieces of betting wisdom in Steven Crist's Exotic Wagering.

INTERVIEW WITH STEVE CRIST
Steven Crist, artist and businessman, man of thought and man of action, skillfully verbal and yet sharp with numbers: all the one-or-the-other traits that human beings choose are blended harmoniously in this modern Renaissance man. C&X has often noted that being well-rounded can contribute to winning at nuanced and complex games. Crist is one piece of anecdotal evidence that suggests we are right.
Here he is cornered with a few tough questions but he also gets one or two slow pitches that he can swing at as he pleases, something he's earned thanks to his being the horseplayer's number one advocate.

mc. As public figures in this game, we are obligated to be opinionated. The confidence in one’s convictions, as guys like you and Beyer have taught us, is prerequisite to successful investing. But inevitably, because of the nature of the game, we will have our wrong days. I once declared that if a certain “no-chance” horse won, I’d invite everyone to dinner, and naturally, the horse won. Prior to the 1989 Belmont Stakes, I seem to recall your having written something like, “entering Le Voyageur in the Belmont must be a question of French arrogance”. Le Voyageur ended up third, and nearly beat Sunday Silence for the place. Was that you?

SC. My only memories of the 1989 are happy ones because I consider that one of my very favorite races ever. I was a huge fan of Easy Goer, and after the Derby and Preakness results, the world abandoned him and concluded he’d never been all that good and was some sort of fictitious creation of the New York media. My friend Andy Beyer said that not only would Sunday Silence win the Belmont, he’d win it by 15 lengths. Easy Goer’s surge to the lead was thus an exhilarating moment, and not just because it completed a $33k pick six; I may be sentimental, but I’m not crazy and had used BOTH EG and SS ($17k) in the race. As for Le Voyageur, I may well have dismissed his entry as French arrogance, but I don’t remember. But I am DEAD wrong often, and cheerfully so.

mc. With people in public positions, for example economists, not accountable for their opinions, no wonder Charles Bukowski wrote that the best way to teach writing is to take students to the race track and obligate them to handicap horses and then put their money where their mouth is. Have you proposed this idea to the Harvard Department of Economy?

SC. Good point, but to tell you the truth I’m not that big on “accountability” with handicappers. There are smart horseplayers whose opinions I will listen to, knowing fully well that they never have and never will show a profit betting. Making money consistently at this game is a lot harder and rarer than most people think, and it requires a different skill set from the ones that make someone an interesting or useful handicapper.

mc. What do you think about successful horse bettors being hired by university economy departments, as teachers and as advisors to the faculty? Your new book, Exotic Betting: How to Make the Multi-horse Multi-race Bets the Win the Biggest Payoffs seems as rigorous if not more so than what we get from the Wall Street Journal.

SC. After playing horses for 20 years, becoming the CEO of a $75 million company wasn’t that daunting. The math is easier, the problems are simpler, the variables are fewer. It’s like turning to one of those races that’s really cut and dried. Of course there are other skills involved, intrapersonal ones to keep your employees and investors happy, but the problem-solving in a tough horse race is tougher than in running most businesses.

mc. You’ve implied certain similarities between serious horseplayers and stock traders. Many of the featured players in Six Secrets of Successful Bettors have or had been stock traders. But what’s the difference between a succesful horse bettor and a successful stock trader?
I don’t trade stocks so I can’t give you a smart enough answer. It seems to me that successful stock trading consists of monetizing very small edges and discrepancies to generate very small profits, whereas horseplaying - at least the way I play - more often involves trying to combine several of those edges and discrepancies in an attempt to make a more substantial profit in a higher risk/reward situation.


SC. How come the Wall Street Journal is cheaper than the Daily Racing Form? Does this mean that we horseplayers are in a higher category?

It also means that horseplayers are not a great consumer target for advertisers. We’re the most expensive newspaper in the world because we make 10 times as much from circulation as from advertising, a complete reversal of the usual newspaper economic model.

mc. The story telling in Betting On Myself is captivating and exquisitely literary. Have you ever considered writing fiction?

My first book, Offtrack, was a collection of short stories, about half of them racing-related. Fiction is something I’d like to get back to in my dotage, which I suppose officially begins when I turn 50 in October.

mc. Moving to a different zone, do you think your experience as a jazz pianist has helped provide a subjective balance to the foundation of objectivity that you show us so clearly in Exotic Betting? Sort of like the improvisation that accompanies the solid harmony. You seem to have found the balance between being an intellectual and a man of action. Did jazz have something to do with this?

SC. Playing jazz probably has something to do with everything, and music, math and horseplaying are all tangled up together in my life and in my mind. Putting the numbers and the emotional/personal impressions together is probably one of the keys in both music and wagering. I remember when I took my SAT’s in high school, where I was supposedly an artsy literary young lad, everyone was horrified when I scored better on the math than verbals.

mc. I’d like to applaud you for being our advocate with the 10 cent superfecta. How about a 10-cent Pick 6? I can see why large bettors would not want such a thing established. I know of one pick 6 player who stays out of the Canterbury pool because it’s a buck Pick 6.

SC. The pick six is the ONE bet I would exempt from the lowest possible minimums simply because it would rarely carry at a dime minimum and carryovers are what the bet is all about. But I think you could lower it from $2 to $1 tomorrow and you’d still have enough carryovers and people could buy twice as many combos and the barrier to entry would be removed for many.

mc. With mathematical precision, you advocate playing Pick 6 only when there’s extra money in the pot. But with professional players like you and Barry Meadow staying out of non-carryover pools, shouldn’t that give an edge to the smaller player with less leverage? Barry says that it’s better to have a small slice of a large ticket rather than a smaller ticket, even if that smaller ticket contains lots of handicapping insight. But what if the smaller ticket is bet on a day when the big boys are boycotting the pool. [Our readers will already understand the concept of A, B, and C choices and know that they are forced to leave out C horses on smaller tickets].

SC. That sounds good in theory, but I’ve never seen it work. By that I mean I don’t know any successful small pick-six players who routinely get underlays on carryover days while pouncing on overlays on non-carryover cards. In fact, I don’t know ANY successful “small” pick-six players other than those who are still in the black off one lucky hit. I think that so many things have to break exactly perfectly for a small player in the pick six, that he might as well have the luckiest day of his life when there’s $1 million instead of $32k up for grabs.

mc. Any parting shot? Something you would have wanted to say if I had asked the right question?

SC. The only thing I’d add is that I advocate exotic play not because it’s necessarily the way for people to develop a better income stream but just because it’s a lot more entertaining than sweating over whether a win bet on a 7-5 shot is “proper value.” You don’t have to decree the winner of a race, you can monetize obscure and even eccentric opinions, and you can combine several such insights to create prices you could never find in a win pool.

mc. Oh, one more question that I can't omit. Once upon a time, we used to think that a prerequisite for a player going into exotics in a serious way was to prove that he could make a flat bet profit with win bets over a reasonable extended period of time. It was thought that if he could not show a profit in the win hole, then he would most likely lose with exotic wagering. Was this prerequisite wrong? Or was it once right but is no longer valid?

SC. I think this prerequisite is correct only in spirit -- if someone is a terrible handicapper, unable to select winners, exotic betting won't make him a winner. However, it is not necessarily correct in practice, because some successful exotic bettors are people who are extremely good at identifying false favorites and/or potentially chaotic races and not necessarily that good at selecting a single most-likely-winner in those situations. If you can predict a pace collapse and are left with four high-priced closers, that alone can be the foundation of a very successful exotic investment with no regard for which one of those four closers is
likeliest to finish first. Exotic play broadly falls into two categories:
1) improving the win price on a single horse through additional opinions about the race (or other races), a case in which keying on the right individual horse IS important; and 2) attacking a race overall because of a weak favorite or favorites, where selection of the single correct first-place finisher may not be important. Also, in multirace bets, a holistic view of possible winners may be more important than zeroing in. By that I mean that if you can confidently narrow a race down to only two or
three possible winners, perhaps eliminating two of the four public choices, it may not be crucial to be able pick among them. The fact that you are going only two- or three-deep in a race where the public is spread much wider, or is using two very unlikely winners in equal strength with (or at the expense of) your solid horses, you have created value without picking
the winner.

HORSEPLAYER BLUES IN C MINOR
In the Australian racing magazine, Practical Punter, I noticed an opinion expressed by one Guy Ward, who was presented as a professional player. I looked more deeply into Mr. Ward's comments after learning that he had the right perspective:
“If you are able to achieve odds greater than the true chance, then over time the laws of mathematics and probability dictate that you will make a long term profit.”
That seemed pretty essential, so I read on until I came an issue that C&X has often addressed. Mr. Ward differentiates between primary information and secondary information, prompting us to think back to so many treatises from experts that differentiate the two based on classical handicapping. Speed, pace, form and class are the primary factors. Everything else is secondary.
As one who works with literature, I often lament that our high schoolers are often fed a yearly diet of the classics, often laborious novels that deaden these students' the original enthusiasm for a good story. I'm not knocking all classical literature, and I actually reread some of my treasures. But why not include a few contemporary page turners in the literature diet? Surely there is something new in recent literature that allows it to compete favorably with the classics.
Mr. Ward's definition of secondary information, that which is “already in the public domain”, which would suggest that the classic factors of handicapping are probably undervalued in most circumstances, unless information overload confuses the public.
Ward's definition of primary information is “information very few people get to hear about”. At the time that Andrew Beyer was doing his own figures, for himself, those figs were primary information, obtainable only by Beyer himself, along with a few other players who were willing to do the hard daily work required to maintain these figs.
For me, the Tomlinson turf ratings were primary information until they were blasted out to the public in the Closer Look and in the performance box of the DRF.
Using these two examples, let's look at what might be real primary information. In the first case, two years back, I picked a $20 winner in the Claiming Crown (on the C&X website). Having interviewed the trainer prior to the race, I learned that the horse's final time was first flashed at more than 8 ticks faster than what was eventually listed in the DRF. The time had seemed too fast, so it was assumed that the automatic timer had failed and a sensible adjustment was then made. Readers of the DRF never learned about the real time.
As for turf figs, there are occasions when information diggers may discover that a particular dam has been extraordinarily successful at producing three or four turf winners. This type of information is not available in the public domain, so it becomes more valuable if the particular progeny is trying the grass for the first time.
There is a hazy area between public domain information and that which can be more valuable. This is especially true with trainer stats. Yours truly has come up with recommended horses in this year's Wood Memorial and Preakness based on the sharp trainer factor. The stat under the pps is one thing, but knowing that the stable is red hot is something that goes beyond the stat itself. Knowing that a trainer is going through a deterministic stage, something I wrote about in Thoroughbred Cycles is a piece of information that can eclipse a long-term statistic.
Such “pieces” of information can be used as “thin slicing”(a concept from a best-selling book that we've reported on in a previous issue). This concept allows us to identify a single factor, often one that is considered a secondary factor, and elevate it to the factor of the race.
In using Crist's method of choosing A, B, C and X horses, the latter being eliminations, it becomes imperative to know where we stand in the hierarchy of value. Are we using factors that represent parimutuel value, or simply factors that should point to “picking” a winner (or a backhole horse in a single-race exotic).
The final story of Scared Money identified a public handicapper whose third choices performed better, on a flat-bet basis, than her first or second choices. Those were her C horses. Those were horses whose informational rationale was supposedly secondary.
My argument here is that a player who can recognize the difference between overused public domain information and underused so-called secondary info, might have to reconsider that hierarchy of A, B, and C horses.
Susan Sweeney is one successful exotics player who already does this. She scorns the usual suspects among handicapping factors, especially speed, and uses secondary factors to construct her tickets. It may be that she collects less often, but isn't that the case for most good players. In my case, I get a higher return on investment when I have a lower hit rate, and this reflects the mode of playing contenders of higher parimutuel value. The fastest horse based on speed may end up as a C horse for Susan.
My success with the turf pedigree ratings, when they were not in the public domain, suggests that there are probably other value factors out there that we could elevate to A or B in our tickets. With this transformation, there is a possibility that we could compete with smaller tickets, as Crist he notes that the only defense of a small player against a deep pocket is to avoid overbet combinations.
The danger, of course, is that we might end up with all the high-priced finishers in the combination and miss out on the obvious one.
It seems that investing in horse racing is defined by the ability to balance the obvious with the truly unique. Where we place the obvious within the scheme of A, B and C will determine our hit rate and average payoff. Just having it is not enough. In the long run, those times we have it need to pay off enough to more than compensate for the majority of times that we don't.


THE DEFINITION OF EFFORT
by Nick Kling, with courtesy of the Troy Record
One of the unique aspects of sport is that participants have a variety of paths they can follow to success.
David Eckstein (St. Louis Cardinals), Jose Reyes (Mets), and Derek Jeter (Yankees) are all shortstops in Major League Baseball. Yet observation would suggest intense determination (Eckstein), unbridled talent (Reyes), and a blend of both
(Jeter) were their separate ladders to stardom.
So it is in Thoroughbred racing. Horses that can't run a step on dirt might become Eclipse champions on grass. The fastest sprinters have been known to hit a proverbial wall when trying to race a mile or more.
Handicappers are also part of the equation. Whether you use nothing but speed figures, past performance class lines, pedigree analysis, trip watching, pace, or trainer angles, you can identify the most likely winner of a Thoroughbred race.
Someone who insists that any of those can't work is just plain wrong.
I began with this caveat because today's topic is about one of my favorite subjects -- handicappers I like to call speed figure nitwits (SFNs). They are people who value numerical calculations that quantify how fast horses run above all else.
A couple of explanations are in order. SFNs define the word "bounce" as a horse running slower in today's race than he or she did in their previous, faster, start. Those very fast races are labeled as "efforts," as in, "Secretariat produced
a career effort when he won the 1973 Belmont Stakes."
It appeared that the ranks of SFNs swelled to capacity in the lead up to the May 20 Preakness Stakes at Pimlico. The two weeks between the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness were dominated by a topic fueled by SFNs -- would Derby winner Barbaro succumb to the monumental performance he produced in the process of dominating America's greatest race.
Practically every day, horse racing websites on the internet carried opinion columns on whether Barbaro would or would not bounce. Usually included in the discussion was how the short two-week gap between the two Triple Crown classics
would affect the horse. Magnifying glasses were employed to dissect every nuance of the colt's performances, as well as Thoroughbreds who had followed similar paths into the same races.
I read these comments because most were written by people I respect. However, by the time I'd waded through them all, I was struck by a light bulb moment. SFNs have improperly defined effort. Hence, their whole theory of when horses do or don't
run fast is irretrievably flawed.
SFNs pin their concept of effort on the fastest races. In other words, when a horse runs its fastest, it is the animal's most taxing, tiring effort. Yet anyone who watches races for a living knows differently. A Thoroughbred's most enervating effort is more likely to come in a race where hard work was involved. The horse was slugging it out on the lead, contesting a fast
pace. Or, it might have been pinned between rivals, bulled through a keyhole, and battled for position.
Races of this type are not likely to produce the horse's fastest speed figures. Is there anyone who believes they take less effort than a lightning-fast race where there were no straws in the animal's path?
Keeping with the Secretariat example, here is a quiz. Did the Triple Crown winner work harder when he won the Kentucky Derby, or when he struggled home a beaten third in the Wood Memorial the race prior -- a performance impacted by a physical ailment?
Now, don't misunderstand. If you go out and run a mile in six minutes, it will tire you more than if you follow the same path a few days later in seven. That's not the issue. But racing cross country, up hills and in traffic, in ten minutes, might produce more sore muscles than the first example. Which took greater effort?
While it is correct to say that a Thoroughbred's feet and legs are impacted by a greater force the faster they run, there are other factors that must be taken into account. Muscle soreness and mental condition are significant parts of the equation, ones that might need more recharging after a slow but troubled race.
Tragically, we will never know what Barbaro might have done May 20. One thing we do know is that there is little chance his injury was caused by a fast race in the Derby or the two week interval. There is evidence from other Kentucky Derby starters that the bounce theory is a self-fulfilling prophecy. That is, the longer horses run well (and fast), the more likely they are to eventually regress. For example, Brother Derek's fastest race, as quantified by the Thorograph performance speed figures, came in the January 14 San Rafael Stakes. Did the effort cause him to bounce next time out? No, Derek produced two more comparable races before faltering in the Derby.
Lawyer Ron scored two very fast races to conclude his juvenile year. So, according to the effort/bounce theory, he should have succumbed when he raced back two weeks later. He didn't. In fact, Lawyer Ron's January 14 win was his fastest
career start until he matched it in the Arkansas Derby.
"Ah-ha," say the SFNs. "He did bounce in his subsequent race, the Kentucky Derby." Sure he did, after producing six straight brilliant efforts. That's like saying Joe DiMaggio bounced in 1941 after hitting in 56 consecutive games.
Make no mistake. A horse has to be fast enough to beat the rivals he or she is entered to face. And there is no doubt that Thoroughbreds have identifiable form cycles that lead them into and out of their best performances.
Nevertheless, the SFNs have missed the bottom line. Horses are individuals and cannot be pigeon-holed. If the effort theory is wrong, it suggests that random chance, as much as expertise, determines SFN success.

QUANTUM JUMP, A DAY AT AUTEUIL
When was the last time you read any article about the jumpers. American jumping races, steeplechase or hurdles, are marginalized from the world of gallop racing. Even less likely that Americans will read about jump racing from France. Yet, my day at the jump races at Auteuil has provided a universal lesson applicable for all horseplayers.
I may be the first American journalist to write about French steeplechase racing since Ernest Hemingway, back in the early 1920s, when he referred to racing as his “demanding friend” in A Moveable Feast. So demanding was the career of following each and every horse and trainer that Hemingway decided to drop his passion and quit racing.
On Sunday, May 28 I returned to the scene of the Hemingway passion: Auteuil Race Course at the western end of Paris in the Boulogne forest. The main event could not have been more seductive. In the Grand Steeplechase of Paris, the horses were going to race at the un-American distance of three miles and 5/8, over 28 different hurdles, including double hurdles and those in which these magnificant animals must fly over a water trap.
Contrary to American horseplayer opinion, jump racing is just as handicappable as the flats, and in some ways more dependable since these horses seem to be less fragile than those who confine their gallops to the flat. Jump racing may be less humane to the horses, since injuries are somewhat more frequent, but it is more humane to the human being, namely the riders, who do not have to suffer starvation, languish in steamrooms, and punish themselves in other ways in order to meet the weight requirements.
The pedigree factor for the jumpers is much more complex than one would imagine. Most handicappers imagine that these jumpers are simply bred for stamina and can be considered plodders in comparison to flat race horses. However, speed pedigree must be somewhere in the formula, for after each jump, the horse must re-accelerate, and it is the moment following the jump where some horses gain an advantage over others. In the Grand Steeplechase of Paris, these magnificent equine athletes would have to accelerate twenty-nine times in the same race!
No drama can compare to this in the realm of racing, and no handicapping puzzle can be as rich and complex. For the universal lesson, I will reduce the grand drama involving 16 horses to a match race between two of them: Kotkijet and Cyrlight, both trained by a hot trainer whose name happens to be double: Chaillé-Chaillé.
Cyrlight was to be ridden by the undeniably dominant jump rider in France, Christophe Pieux. Cyrlight was undefeated in steeplechase races, with 12 wins in 12 tries. Cyrlight was picked to win by 33 of the 35 public handicappers. But Cyrlight was stretching out for the first time, from 2 and 6 furlongs, to 3 miles and 5 furlongs.
Cyrlight’s stablemate, the 11-year-old Kotkijet, had won this very same event twice, in 2001 and 2004, and no one was picking him.
The trainer had spoken highly of both his horses, and reading between the lines, you could not see much of a difference in his opinion between the two.
Following a long layoff of a year and a half, Kotkijet had performed well in two prep races, finishing second both times. The horse that beat him by a head in his most recent prep, Princesse d’Anjou, was also entered in the Grand Steeplechase of Paris. Public handicappers and Kotkijet’s trainer as well alike recognized that Kotkijet had not been “used” in that prep race.
Based on Cyrlight’s undefeated record and his rider who is a master at rationing speed, we could make Cyrlight the most-likely winner. But the difference between these two most-likely winners should not be so great.
The universal lesson I referred to came on the toteboard. Cyrlight was going off at 1 / 2 while Kotkijet’s odds were 7-1. I visualized the race. After 2 miles and 6 furlongs, the early-paced Cyrlight would be rating in the lead. But the remaining 7 furlongs might seem long to Cyrlight, in comparison with Kotkijet, who had eaten up these extra 7 furlongs with professional workmanship on two occasions.
This dramatic race renewed my love for the live event over fresh grass on a brilliant Spring day. Cyrlight pranced in the lead, taking all the jumps in perfect stride. But after each jump, Kotkijet seems to burst forward until he was pressing his stablemate. The race would develop into a duel during the final 7 furlongs, and I felt it was inevitable that Kotkijet would pass Cyrlight. I was right.
However, several horses from the rest of the field, left in the distance for most of the race, began closing the gap. Following the final hurdle, it looked as if Kotkijet would prevail. At 50 yards from the finish line, none other than Princess d’Anjou, the same horse that had defeated Kotkijet in their prep race, flew by him to win by two lengths, with another horse also passing Kotkijet in the late going. The “pace duel” between stablemates had taken its toll, and perhaps Kotkijet’s senior citizen status may have taken a little out of him at the end. He still finished third in a field of 16, eight lengths ahead of fourth place finisher Cyrlight.
The race took 7 minutes and 8 seconds, as if you had run the Breeders’ Cup Classic in exciting slow motion.
I lost my bet, even though the logic behind it was confirmed.
For those of us who play the Tbreds in America, this logic is the core of successful betting. With fields considerable smaller than 16 horses, if we were to ever get 7-1 on our second choice while our top choice was 1 / 2, then why not play the second choice? The differential is too great to go with our “pick”.
Consider this situation in a series of 20 events. Our top choice might win 12 times, our second choice might win 3 times, and neither would win the other 5 races. We would still lose money betting our top choice, collecting $36 for $40 invested. With our second choice, we’d collect $48 for our $40 invested.
We would collect less and win more.
Some of you might find a flaw in my analysis. If Princesse d’Anjou had defeated Kotkijet in their prep race and she was 25-1 versus Kotkijet’s 7-1, why not at least have a backup bet on her. In retrospect, I think you’d be right, not because I could have judged the Princess to be a better horse, but because the odds differential warranted at least a token saver bet.
The lesson is still true. A betting decision depends in part on our handicapping and in part on the relative odds of our contenders. Most players spend too great a proportion of their investment time on the handicapping and not nearly enough on the decision making.
One final note of importance refers to the takeout. In France, the takeout on straight bets is roughly 21 percent. But as you can see from the above example, when there are inefficiencies in the market, profits can be made, regardless of the takeout. The takeout amount is certainly important, but the most important factor for players is finding a race or race track where the public thinks / bets inefficiently. It’s like sitting down to play poker at a table of the best pros or another table where the competition is weaker.
In conclusion, parimutuel horse wagering is a universal investment. The country or the genre may change, but the fundamentals remain the same. And wherever you go, it’s a lot of work!
That’s why Hemingway got out.

THE C&X CAFE

FROM MICHAEL M.
I think you should do an issue or two on your top ten handicapping ideas over the past years. Maybe you could select the best idea of the year for the past 10 years. I know you would repeat information but that would not bother me as it would make the great ideas accessible in one or two issues and give your readership what you think are the top ideas from the many great ones you have published. For example, the big win; the short form, and so forth are the types of ideas I am talking about.
Mark responds:
This we shall do in the next issue. A quick reminder on the short form. You have two easy eliminations that sometimes get rid of half the field or more. First, toss no-win trainer-rider combos. If both have less than a 10% hit rate. Or if either one is 7% or lower. Second, eliminate proven losers at today's class level. A proven loser has lost at least two races at today's level. Naturally, if he has a legit excuse in both of those losses, give him one more try before tossing. (Lightly-raced horses usually have the advantage over proven losers.)
Michael's got a Ph.D. in computer science. I hereby authorize Michael to come up with some software combining the factors I will outline next week. I don't need any royalties. Just share it, open source, with the C&X readers.mc

HUMOR FROM BOB
some maryland horse owners are being investigated. apparently they were feeding viagra to their horses. stewards became suspicious when a horse won a close race...
and it wasn't by a nose.
regards,
bob

END NOTES
Morty on Bailey
No room here to mention every distinction of C&X readers. Too many. This is a one of the greatest groups of readers ever collected. We must find a way to get us all together. One ready who must be mentioned is Morty Mittenthal, who has recently published a two volume DVD entitled "Jerry Bailey's Inside Track: your Inside Advantage to Horse Racing and Handicapping". My copy has not yet arrived in the mail, but I've already received glowing reports from several players whose judgment I trust, and having corresponded with Morty, I can affirm that he's thinks outside the box.
Stakes Weekend
Our next Stakes Weekend will be Claiming Crown on Saturday, July 15. I will be at Canterbury Park for the whole week leading up to the big day. I'll be interviewing trainers, owners, riders and grooms, in search of “primary information”. You will be able to read my Barn Notes on the days leading up to the event on www.canterburypark.com . On the Friday before the event, I'll post the C&X commentary, and I'll assume that you will have read the Barn Notes so that I will not have to repeat all the details. Since the Barn Notes will not refer to any investment ideas, the C&X commentary will zoom in on that area. You should be aware of the information that led to my synthesis, since you may wish to use that information in other ways that my limited imagination would not capture.mc

Posted by: Mark / 10:42 PM