Mark Cramer
C & X Report

C&X 31

CONTENTS
Editorial
Research
Player Profile: an informed minority
On perfection
Handicapping hellhole: the mother of all contests
Early speed according to Klein
He who lives by the buzz dies by the buzz
The Last Word

EDITORIAL
I have received the following messages from longtime readers, Toshe, and Dr. Billy M, hero of the 2005 Kentucky Derby.

Mark,
Other handicappers point out that Richard Matlow's stats at Del Mar are dismal, but Mark Cramer says bet his firsters. Paid $40 yesterday, and I HAD HIM!
Plus the exacta. going to Saratoga in 5 days and will be thinking of you.
bill

Hi Mark,
Years ago I was an attendee at a weekend racing seminar at Pimlico. You were one of the instructors along with Ron Ambrose and Dick Mitchell. Anyway, at Del Mar, Richard Matlow sent out a pair of debut horses in maiden claimers. Yesterday, his horse Ridingwiththeking won at 19-1. I had planned to bet it, but my wife and I took a walk into town and I completely forgot about it until later in the day when I learned the bad news. Today, he sent out Keylimepie in a $62.5K maiden claimer and he was a close second at 5-1 to the favorite, which was dropping from MSWs. Its good to see that your angles are still doing well today, and at Del Mar, too.
Best wishes in your future endeavors,
Toshi

I first published the automatic bet on Matlow's first-time starters in Thoroughbred Cycles back in 1990. The subject was trainer determinism, and this was long before most players ever considered that the trainer might be a primary factor. Subsequently, I've restated this automatic bet periodically in various issues of C&X. I would like to repeat it more often, but I'd risk being accused of recycling. Regular readers like Dr. Billy M do not forget.
Even to this very date, 16 years after I first plugged in to the Matlow phenomenon, those naysayers who demand a large sample for an automatic bet would still be waiting for Matlow and not playing him, for he only has a handfull of first-time starters each year, not enough for the required long sample.
Thus, we have the usual question about the importance of sample size. You'll be reading a review of Steve Klein's new book on early speed, in which he uses samples of extraordinary size (as large as seven figures!). You'll also read about another episode in the ongoing "Informed Minority" reseach that may never reach even a fraction of the sample size in Steve Klein's research but looks like a bettable method.
The best bets in racing, I am convinced, are those that arrive occasionally, the ones we must wait for patiently. The other ones, the ones we force because we're hungry for action, are the worst bets. Perhaps this involves a whole approach to life in which "better" does not mean "more". How we manage our time (and our betting time) is crucial to the longterm success and pleasure derived from pari-mutuel betting, unless of course you enjoy losing.
Though it does not mention horse race betting, one of the greatest books on time management is The Art of Time, by Jean-Louis Servan-Schreiber. As you would guess, this is a short book. You can never gain time, he explains, nor save it, but you can master it, and mastering time is the key to mastering ourselves.
If we could just learn to wait for the fine moments, like the Matlow moments, we would have ample resources left to take advantage of those moments and truly savor them.
Servan-Schreiber notes (with my racing additions in brackets) that "we dedicate particles of time to a multitude of pleasures [wagers] instead of profiting from the rare and splendid ones that are truly in our interest."
The quest for a large research sample implies that we are going to find an every day bets that occur several times on every race card. But a large sample may also be a shallow one. We are not advocating smaller samples but ones of deeper meaning that may be smaller simply because they do not occur all so frequently.
The pari-mutuel system seems to penalize discoveries that occur frequently because a high-frequency phenomenon is more likely to attract the attention of the public, and therefore deflate in value.
mc

RESEARCH: the Informed Minority
Any time we have a method that yields a profit but does not have a high hit rate, it is easy to get off the bandwagon at any point of discouragement, especially if this method does not offer a 10,000 race sample to go on.
In this year's Kentucky Derby, the one «informed minority» horse failed to produce. In retrospect, the public handicapper who chose that horse had never had an "informed minority" winner even if his percentage of winners is quite respectable. That said, we are not supposed to intervene in an automatic bet. Or are we? One of the original precepts of the "informed minority" is to only use handicapping grids that contain the most accomplished of public experts. At certain racing venues, the grid of public handicappers is far superior to others, so we must be selective in our choice of grid and event. This is why previous research has concentrated on grids of big events which coalesce a high-quality array of public handicappers.
The Informed Minority is research in progress. It's held its bottom-line profit through Breeders' Cups and Claiming Crowns, though it does not always have a profitable race card, and it's percentage of winners is relatively low.
For those of you who are new to C&X, the Informed Minority is a method that picks horses that are chosen by only a single public handicapper on a grid of at least seven, and preferably more. In smaller grids, the Informed Minority could be a single choice of a horse that is not chosen anywhere in the top three of the other public pickers on the grid.
In Claiming Crown 2006, there was a grid of 10 handicappers. The selections included the seven Claiming Crown races plus the Lady Canterbury for fillies and mares on the turf. There were 15 informed-minority horses on the grid: in other words, horses selected by a single public handicapper. Of those 15, there were three winners. Rounding off the returns, Al's Dearly Bred, picked by my friend and colleague Jeff Maday, paid $9.00. The other two winners were both picked by the DRF Chicago handicapper Marcus Hersh. He had Radiant Avie in the Lady Canterbury, who paid 15.00 and Tens Holy Spirit in the Tiara on the turf, who returned 28.00. The total return was $52.00 from an investment of $30.
Once more, the Informed Minority has managed to find a way. When can we start betting on this? I'd like to hear some of your opinions. You can also participate in this research by tallying the informed minority for big racing days at your local track. The only prerequisite is that we must have reputable handicappers on the grid.
Eventually, we can probably filter out the uninformed minority from those public pickers who have a true talent for going against the grain. Don, a longtime C&X reader and a former trainer, has responded to our ongoing request for readers to send us independent samples. In this case, he's gone beyond the big-racing-day format, and so his sample is of special interest; for it will tell us if we have any way to expand this bet.
Don's sample
There are some promising results to consider, and Don has done what we've suggested in previous analysis of this method: isolate the individual handicappers within the grid. Here's what he has to say.
Mark,
I'm sending this because you mentioned a lack of e-mails from readers. I did the informed minority selections for the 2006 Gulfstream Park meet. It is not complete: I missed 3 weeks in Feb when I was in new york. I also didn't have a few late results on some cards. What I do have is 297 selections separated by the individuals selecting them from the DRF with notes on secondary factors of each horse such as: blinks (on/off), Lasix, proven losers, trainer %, lay1,2,3,4, claim 1,2 etc. There were 3 DRF selectors who returned positive roi's.
Welsch 53 races 10 wins roi 1.11 ($1.11 for each dollar invested)
Gropper 56 races 7 wins roi 1.15
Peck 79 races 10 wins roi 0.97. Peck had 1 winner at $58.60, not a PL, which i purposely excluded from any calculations. I can make copies & send the results of each trainer, date, race#, name of horse w/appropriate comments if you wish. My reward & satisfaction for doing this was to compare my results w/good handicappers to try and verify that what i am doing is not a fluke and if the parameters I learned from you, C&X and Mr. Mitchell would have improved the results of their selections. It was a check on myself and I like what I found. By not being 100% accurate because I missed too many days, i wasn't going to mention this. But, if this can be of any help to you I'll be happy to send all of it. It's actually readable.
Don

Mark responds:
By all means, send this to me, Don, and thanks for helping to make C&X an interactive publication. If I understand correctly, had you not excluded Peck's $58.60 winner, he'd have had an enormous flat-bet profit. Contrary to my other research, in the informed-minority research I do not exclude the high mutuels, for, from its past history, the informed minority is supposed to pick tote blasters and does not depend on percentage of winners.
Don refers to the late Dick Mitchell, who once suggested in C&X that we could improve the roi of the Informed Minority bet by excluding all qualifying horses whose odds were not above a certain minimum requirement. This remains a possibility. Mitchell did not suggest to include any horse that was above a threshhold odds. He was aware that this method is remarkably good at picking out those rare toteblasters that keep us rolling for a long time.
Any readers who specialize in a track that has a better than competent handicappers grid would do well to keep research records and share them with us. Note that Don's discovery has isolated the more proficient longshot pickers, and it seems that this might be the best way for a regular meet where public handicappers may not be in the inspiration zone for every race card.

PLAYER PROFILE:
Marcus Hersh, the Informed Minority
The informed minority is usually unknown to us. We know his name and that's it. We don't know how he came to differ with the other public pickers. We have no idea if he's really handicapping or if he had inside information.
As a racing journalist, I get paid to dig for information. It was not hard to dig into the reasons for Marcus Hersh's two winning informed minority picks on the Claiming Crown program, for he was sitting right next to me. I just had to ask him.
His first pick came in the Lady Canterbury, a mile on the turf. The favorite was Stretching, who was coming out of a competitive Grade II race against proven classy horses. Winner of three straight 1 1/16 races, Stretching shortened up to a mile at Lone Star and couldn't get up in time when lacking room. He earned a 91 Beyer for that race and nothing else in this field came near.
Every smartass public handicapper was picking Stretching. It was intimidating for anyone who was not in the Stretching Fan Club. I feared that the come-from-behinder Stretching might not get up on time in a slow-paced field, so I went with the winner of the previous year's edition of the same race, Rue des Reves, who was a pace presser. I figured she Rue de Reves could keep close enough to the eventual leaders to have first run on the final turn. Another horse getting action was the Nafzger shipper Aimer, sporting two 87 Beyers and having won a non-winners of 2 allowance at Churchill, a classy track. The front runner figured to be Radiant Avie, whose best Beyer (at Arlington) was an 83. Like Aimer, Radiant Avie had won a non-winners of 2.
Radiant Avie was the informed-minority pick of Marcus Hersh. She went wire to wire to pay $15 and change. My horse, Rue des Reves, was farther off the pace than usual and versus the lone front runner could only manage to get up for the place. As I suspected, the favored Stretching had too much ground to make up and she was only able to catch the show spot.
(Pps of the four contenders will be included in the print edition)
"Radiant Avie was gonna get the early lead," Hersh explained. Hersh knew the horse from his Midwest handicapping. "From a form perspective, she had not yet come back to her peak of last year," Hersh added, "so there was room for improvement. Stretching, on the other hand, was third on yielding ground, and that was not enough to indicate that she should be favored."
In other words, Hersh saw the form of these horses in motion rather than static, as if each horse were on an escalator of distinct incline or decline, so he had no trouble picking a horse that had apparently raced more slowly in her last race.
Hersh's other informed-minority winner was Ten's Holy Spirit, who paid $28 and change. Once more, both the pace and form factors were in the mix of Hersh's analysis.
(Pps of Tens Holy Spirit in the print edition)
Though we understood that Canterbury Beyer ratings are often underestimated, we felt that Tens Holy Spirit had raced too slowly in her only turf win, and we observed that she had failed to win a nw1 at Tampa in two tries, only to break that barrier when switching from turf to dirt. That said, it is quite difficult for speed to hold up on the turf at Tampa, so THS could not be overly penalized for those losses.
Neverthless, it was a stretch to put a horse on top who had only won once on the grass.
Hersh reversed our logic and compared Tens Holy Spirit's recent win with the two losses.
"She had early speed in a fast pace twice at Tampa," Hersh explained. "The fact that she had won her last race from off the pace told me that she had learned, and that she now knew how to relax. In this particular race, there was going to be a fast pace, and the favorite was in post 10. Tens Holy Spirit had the advantage of the rail."
Once more, Hersh shows us a dynamic interpretation of the past performances. Rather than adding up the records from the past, he looks deeply for the movement, the progression of a horse's form and development. He's predicting change rather than continuity.
Marcus Hersh is the Midwest DRF analyst. He's calm and collected and he works intensely on every race, as I could observe first hand. Regular Chicago players might wish to tally Hersh's informed-minority picks over the long run. Like father like daughter: Hersh was there with his daughter at his side, and she was as cool and calm as he was.
Hersh is an inner directed soul who admittedly does not read the expert handicappers. He has his own ways. In my years being in the Canterbury press box, this is the first guy who ever brought his child to sit with him at work. I took notice of this for in the past, I would sometimes take my children to work and let them perceive a different world. Hersh left me other hints that he is not a follower of the crowd. A willingness to be different, in all aspects of life, may be one of the indicators of a potential informed minority.
PS. It remains to be seen if Hersh will be the sire of a horseplayer. Yours truly is at the bottom of horseplayer sire ratings, having failed to produce a horseplayer in four tries. I'm still available for another try, and my stud fee is reasonable.

ON PERFECTION
Which would you rather have? The first possibility is a wager where there is no takeout and where you have a positive expection. In other words, the track skims no money from the top of your returns. The hitch is that you can only play one combination, and it involves ten races!
The second possibility is the normal exotic, where the track takes out approximately 25% from the payout but where you can play different combinations and gain valuable leverage.
In the short run, the second possibility makes more sense, but in the long run, it is always better to play into a positive expectation scenario.
I had my one crack at the first situation. Canterbury offers an in-the-money pool bet. For 10 bucks you choose an in-the-money finisher for all 10 races on the card. If you hit all of them, you collect. You might even take down the whole pool! And if no one has it, there's a carryover. Each player is only allowed a single ticket, so a big player cannot leverage out the little guy.
This particular eve, there was approximately $3,000 in the pot. Canterbury has to be applauded for offering a wager that yields no gain for the track. It does get players to handicap all the races, and probably attracts money into the pools, so its a good marketing tool. Other tracks should see the advantage of giving something of value to the players, especially in the age of simulcasting when they don't have to play the home track card.
I had to handicap all the races anyway, since my picks were going on the in-track TV. I used all my available knowledge, which meant not only using my top picks. I had to imagine which of my contenders would be more likely to be in the money, and that meant occasionally bypassing a top choice in favor of a second or third pick.
As it turned out I had nine in the money finishers. In the other race, the conditions were for non-winners of a race in 2006. Under such conditions, you want a lightly-raced horse that is rounding into form. A horse that is 0-for-12 for the year is less likely to win a race under these conditions than a horse that's 0-for-3. The 0-for-12 horse has become a proven loser. the 0-for-3 horse still has a right to improve in his fourth race after the layoff.
My top pick, Steady Breeze, had lost only three races in 2006, with each race finding increased early speed. My second choice, Quite Bold, had only two losses in 2006.
Steady Breeze was 8 4-0-1 for the 6 ½ furlong distance while Quite Bold was 8 3-0-2 for the same specialty distance.
Steady Breeze went to an early lead with a little work to get there. He was leading all the way and seemed to gain energy in early stretch. In the late going, he was tiring but Seth Martinez went to the whip, more than what would be considered normal. Martinez was never accused of not going all out, and if you have horse in third place in your tri, you know he's not gonna give up when he knows that the horse will not win.
But in the last 20 yards ... three other horses passed Steady Breeze. The winner was Quite Bold, my second pick.
Steady Breeze was the only horse among my picks on the night's racing card that did not make it into the top three. Only one player had all 10, so he took down the whole pool. There was no consolation. This brought back fine memories: a handicapping tournament in which I finished fifth when there were four prizes, and another tournament where I finished seventh when there were six prizes.
This brings us back to the original question. We had a wager that required perfection. In every aspect of life no matter how objective it may be, even in medicine, aviation, and golf, near perfection is sufficient to succeed and to be number one. Are horse race wagers so cruel as to demand total perfection? And if saw a wager that required total perfection but that had no takeout plus a carryover (a huge positive expectation), would you dive in?
Or would you prefer a high takeout exotic bet like the Pick 3 or the trifecta, where the leverage of making various combinations and permutations can increase our chances of collecting a big payoff.
I have no answer. But from a visceral perspective I do know that I cannot resist a wager with zero takeout plus carryover in which all wagerers are competing on an even playing field.

HANDICAPPING HELLHOLE: THE MOTHER OF ALL TOURNAMENTS
At Claiming Crown and at other venues, for $2,000 to get in, you have a chance for a guaranteed $50,000, or more depending on the number of entrants. Before we look at a blow-by-blow description of this contest, sponsored by Ross Gallo and his SG Scientific Games, let's look at the rules.
One half of the $2,000 entry fee goes to prize money and the other half goes to the entrant's personal wagering that will determine his position in the final standings. With 59 entrants and considering the prize money, the sponsors of the tournament were not going to make any money. Evidently they do it for the love of the game. Mr. Gallo himself has played in such tournaments, and his sponsorship seems more like that of a player than of an entrepreneur.
As with the Canterbury whole-card-in-the-money wager, it seems that as if we have a wager with no takeout and a positive expectation.
But now, let's consider the rules. You have a $1,000 bankroll and you have eight designated races to play. You must play six of them. The menu in this particular occasion included the seven Claiming Crown races and the Lady Canterbury on the turf.
The rule that prevented yours truly from entering this contest was a requirement that you must wager 50 percent of your bankroll each time. Consider the mathematics of this rule. I have entered tournaments in which you must wager 10 percent of bankroll each day, for four days, but with 10 percent, there was some degree of maneuverability.
Dick Mitchell once wrote that 4 percent of bankroll was probably too bold for most players. Most experts in betting strategy believe that 3 percent of bankroll is a reasonably bold amount. But in Gallo's contest, it was 50 percent of bankroll!
Such requirements would force the player into a simultaneous offensive and defensive strategy; with even show bets as legitimate bankroll protectors. The player would have to balance the bold with the conservative, and save his or her bankroll for taking a few shots at high-return plays.
For me this was not handicapping but a contest of horseplaying gladiators. As the day progressed, one by one, a marquee array of famous handicappers were tapping out. This is an analytical article and not sensationalist, so the names of the celebrity players are not important.
Of the 59 entrants, only 7 players got back more than their $1,000 original bankroll. A more significant stat is that only 19 of the 59 did not tap out! A normal race track hoping to make a profit would not off such betting scenario, for with little or no churn, the track would lose the steadiest of its customers far too soon.
As a curious journalist, I could not resist the chance to interview the winner, one Michelle Davis. At the winner's ceremony she was surrounded by admirers, so I had to calculate one question that would give me some reasonably important information, in case I was swept away by the herd.
"Which particular wager got you over the top?" I asked.
"Castello d'Oro," she responded. This is the colt that won the Express and paid $71.80. Castello d'Oro had finished 14 lengths behind three other horses from this same field in his last race, at Canterbury, and those three other horses were all longshots. In his previous prep race, also at Canterbury, he'd finished fifth in a field of six, 7 lengths behind. He'd had a single win in 2006, and that was as an even money favorite in a 6-horse field at Turf Paradise.
His connections were Canterbury people.
"What factors made you choose this horse?" I asked her.
"This was a local horse," Michelle responded, "and we have to back our local product."
She sounded more like the president of the Castello d'Oro fan club than a horse race handicapper. This was hardly the answer we would expect from an enlightened handicapper. As difficult as the tournament rules were, I could not imagine that a sentimental guessing could bring down the top prize.
I followed up by asking around among experts who'd played in other tournaments. They had a mixed analysis. Some thought that the rules of the tournament would favor luck over handicapping prowess. Others suggested that the winner might be a name lender for other players who wanted more than one entry.
Whatever the case, this was no easy contest. I followed the entries of my colleague Steve Fierro. Steve recognized before entering that the rules were not optimal, and I got the sense that he had entered only as a good sport. Steve has been a Claiming Crown handicapping hero in the past, and an "informed minority" as well.
His strategy seemed about as logical as it could be, and his handicapping allowed for multiple textures and levels of investment. Steve was one of the forty who ended up with less than a buck from their original bankroll.
One might argue that the card itself was extremely difficult. There were either superfavorites whose victory would not move us along or full fields of multiple contenders which looked more like a crap shoot. But I would never blame a card of racing, and our research on the "informed minority" proves that even within near total chaos, some minds can find order.
This is a great game, and I'm thrilled that I stayed out of this one part of it. It's much more fun writing this up as a journalist than as a visitor to the gladiator pits.

EARLY SPEED:
THE ANSWER?
Review of Steve Klein's The Power of Early Speed (Daily Racing Form, $14.95).
Here at C&X we often refer to the word "objective", in order to differentiate from impressionistic or hunch handicapping. If ever there was an objective book about horse race handicapping, this is it.
With the DRF database at his disposition, Klein has studied the early speed factor with monumental samples. For example, "In the 1,671,627-horse sample, the first-call leaders won 28.4 percent of the time, and returned a $3.12 ROI (from $2), ... while those who were second at that point were still profitable at $2.13, and won 18 percent of their races."
As the position at the first call declines, so does the win percentage and the return on investment. It gets really bad for those who insist on backing deep closers. (Wouldn't you love to book their bets?)
Klein breaks down these stats in every which way: by odds categories, surface, distance, track, class, age and gender, and even trainer and jockey. For example, we learn that early speed is most effective at the lowest class levels and is slightly less effective the higher you go, but that only at Grade I does it dip below 20% winners and go slightly below a flat-bet profit. This finding corroborates my early-speed/class-drop article of many years ago. However, leading at the first call is still highly effective at all class levels.
With all these great stats (too many to repeat here), you'd think it would be easy to win at the races by betting the most-likely horse to have the lead at the first quarter fraction. However, knowing which horse will have the lead is susceptible to numerous other variables, including form cycle and class itself. Klein does his best to compensate for this missing link by coming up with a method called the "Klein Speed Points". He provides the formula and, though not simplistic, is easy to use. We all know that the Quirin speed points have long existed. Klein explains how the Quirin points, though revolutionary in their time, had certain defects, most notably the fact that they do not consider the field size factor.
In the end, there is the missing link that Klein cannot capture in a statistical way. For example, thanks to Klein, we learn that if you can select the first fraction leader in a maiden claiming race, you will end up with just above 30 percent winners and an incredible $3.62 return for each $2 invested, and his sample is 41,725 races! However, in how many of those instances could we have identified the horse that would capture the lead?
Klein's Speed Points certainly enable us to get closer to the 30 percent stat than we would have been without those Speed Points. At least one of his sample races that illustrate method (Fairgrounds, Race 8, 28 January 2005) leaves us a little thirsty for a more complex example. Mr. Meso won that race and paid $19.80 and effectively, Klein's Speed Points selected this horse. However, so did a raw comparison of the fractions of all the horses in the field. In his previous race, Mr. Meso earned a 46.4 while fourth at the second call. But all the other horses were well over 47, except for Que Candy, who tied with Mr. Meso on fractions alone.
Most of the stats are remarkably valuable, but not necessarily in the obvious way. For example, in the jockey subset of early speed stats, we find that low-percentage Canterbury rider Jordan Olesiak gives us a $13.30 roi on his early speed horses. Does this mean that he's a great rider? In fact, usually we'd eliminate a horse ridden by Olesiak. But the Klein stat tells us that this particular rider may have one asset that's underbet by the public.
Lest you think that Russel Baze should not be bet against on a early speed horse, Klein's stat tells us that Baze gets 17 percent winners from his front-running horses with a loss of 6.5 cents per dollar. Baze is still good with E horses, but not invincible.
Since we're only part into the Saratoga and Del Mar meets, let's look at which jockeys and trainers do best at these meets with front-running types, with both ROI and win percentage as necessary.
Del Mar riders:
David Flores
Alex Bisono
Saratoga rides:
JR Velazquez
Aaron Gryder
Del Mar Trainers:
Ruben Cardenas
Bruce Headley
Wesley Ward
Doug O'Neil
Saratoga Trainers:
Todd Pletcher
Scott Lake
Pletcher is a surprise. We expect him to win but we do not expect him to return a profit for his bettors. In fact, it seems as if the top trainers at Saratoga do not fail their backers, while top trainers at Del Mar are vulnerable. Bob Baffert and Jeff Mullins, for example, show a huge flat-bet loss at Del Mar with their early horses.
In using this factor, the positive roi of these above riders and trainers does not come from the obvious horses that show 1-1-1-1 in their running line, but from those that chart to get a lead, because of they earned fast fractions in races where they did not have the lead or because they are improving in form and increasingly better early speed so that they can be projected to get off to a faster start today than they did in their previous race.
Best distance: Del Mar
As for distances where a front running effort has the best return, at Del Mar, by far, it's the 5 1/2 sprint, as well as routes of 1 1/16 and 1 1/8. These distances combine a high win percentage, above 30 percent, with a high return on investment. You double your money at the 5 1/2 and you triple your money in the routes.
Best distance: Saratoga
Saratoga is less friendly to front running speed, with the 5 and 5 1/2 furlong sprints as the best bets. In Saratoga, the rains often come. Only a "muddy" designation moves up the front speed, with "sloppy" and "good" providing less of an advantage, but still better for the speed than for the closers.
As you can see from these small references, there is a wealth of useful statistics in Klein's book. Both the Klein Speed Points and his method for calculating track bias are worthy and elegant additions to the literature and science of horse race handicapping. These two methods combined with the rich reservoir of research stats make this book far more valuable than its cover price.

THIN SLICING AND THIN STATS
In the ongoing discussion, this issue, of sample size, allow me to refer to Race 5, Canterbury, July 14. It looked like a competitive race at OC 25k/N1X. I was sitting at the bar in conversation with two readers and the groom of a Claiming Crown horse. Normally for me, socializing and betting do not mix. I'm not a born multi-tasker, though I often have to do it anyway.
So in social situations, I usually do not bet. In this case, the conversation shifted to this race, which I found too competitive from a handicapping point of view.
In races where anything can happen, I look for "the different horse". There was one. The horse had never before been on the dirt. What was he doing in this field?
Naturally I looked down at the trainer stats for an answer. One statistic popped off the page. The trainer of the 2-horse Pawnsay, Mack Robertson, had an unusual stat. Normally he's a steady 21 trainer, but everyone knows about him so he's not a profitable bet.
But Robertson's 6-1 horse had been on the turf for all of his five career races, and one particular stat would tell me if I should pursue this matter.
Robertson Turf/Dirt (31 .35 $2.14)
Compare the above Robertson stat to his other stats from Pawnsay's and other pps on the card:
Dirt (276 .22 $156)
Sprint (250 .22 $1.59)
Turf (116 .24 $1.68)
Alw (108 .18 $1.35)
Dirt/Turf (42 .10 $0.65)
The turf-to-dirt stat offered a huge contrast against all the others. Most striking for me was the contrast between Dirt/Turf and Turf/Dirt!
Surely there were other factors in the race, much more complex than this one. But among the other six horses there were no positive trainers stats (with one small exception), and all the other trainer stats had ROIs that were worse than what one would lose by random betting.
On the basis of this one piece of logic, one single trainer stat with only a 31-race sample, I made an action bet on the Robertson horse. The horse won, paying off at nearly 7-1.
There are two issues here. One is the small sample. In order to get a large turf-to-dirt sample for Robertson, I'd have to wait through his lifetime and maybe if his son inherited the trainer job, I might be able to continue the stat, and maybe it would be a play after the grandson continued the stat. Either I would lose the small sample, or discard it.
The other issue is "thin slicing", a term we horseplayers used long before it became a buzz word in a best-selling book. We called it an "angle". Sure, an angle slices thinly through the complexity of the past performances, doesn't it? With the betting public doing a damn good job at collective and comprehensive handicapping, it certainly is difficult to confront the betting public as a standing army: head-on. Thin slicing is more equivalent to guerrilla warfare. We attack only when the standing army is too clumsy and when we are more agile.
By definition, winning in a pari-mutuel situation requires using a different approach from the sophisticated crowd, for the crowd's analysis is overbet and underpaid. Thin slicing, when applied elegantly and with agility, seems to be a good answer. But there are two obstacles.
The first is that we cannot force it. We will lose if we play every single angle. There are too many of them. Had Robertson's stats been positive in all categories, then the value of this one category would have been diminished or neutralized. We have to sense when one angle rises above all the rest. In this Robertson case, it was not only the one simple stat but also the contrast with his other stats.
The second obstacle runs deeper. We have been conditioned to comprehensive handicapping. It is a quasi-religious and cultural conditioning. It is sinful to not handicap in the accepted way. I am trained in the theme of culture, conditioning and the willingness of human beings to change. I write books about the subject. Changing one's ways means demolishing immense psychic barriers within us. It's not easy. To be a successful angle player, we not only have to cross the border out of the country of comprehensive handicapping but we cannot trust everything we see on the other side of the border. We have to be selective.
It won't do us any good to demolish the barriers of conventional handicapping if we dive in and play all angles indiscriminately. The trainer stats relating to this particular Robertson horse, serve as a clear example of one case in which teh angle superseded everything else.

HE WHO LIVES BY THE BUZZ DIES BY THE BUZZ
Three Claiming Crowns ago, in 2004, I picked a $20 winner on the C&X website, by the name of Chisholm. On Thursday I found myself playing against Chisholm. Since his win, he has spiraled to a new bottom. He had not one a single race in 2005 or 2006. In looking back, the reason I was able to put Chisholm on top came from inside information, directly from the trainer.
But when one hangs around the track and gets bombarded by insider information, the end result can be catastrophic. Some trainers and owners "like" their horses in a way that is even more subjective than the way we bettors "like" a horse. In reviewing my Claiming Crown analysis for the past two years, I can safely conclude that the Chisholm win caused me to overestimate the value of inside information.
Two painful examples come to mind. In this year's the Express, I had put the Richard Englander horse Whose Career on top. Englander is a hands-on owner who works directly with his owners, and claims are made with this owner's approval. The highly successful Englander's exhuberance for the horse [we had once done of profile of Englander in C&X] was seductive. But when I saw that the horse's 12-1 morning line had crumbled to 5-1, in large part thanks to Englander's own money and his broadcast enthusiasm for the horse, I realized, too late, that I'd stumbled into a trap. You cannot make money playing horses that should be at least 8-1 or 9-1 for fair odds when they are bet down to 5-1 or 6-1. If the horse had won, I'd have breathed a sigh of relief, knowing it was a pick three inclusion that I should not have depended on.
In the following race, The Emerald, I had put Dr. Detroit on top of my second choice Al's Dearly Bred, the eventual winner. The reason for making this choice was the eloquent assistant trainer's seemingly objective description of Dr. Detroit's physical condition.
But Antonio also told me that Dr. Detroit had a problem with hot weather because he did not sweat. At the moment I typed in my choices for the race, the weather forecast had downgraded the heat warning, it had cooled off outside, and we were expecting a reasonable 90 degrees followed by a cool-off.
But after my picks and posts were in, the weather forecasters went back to their original predictions of plus 95 temperatures. It is difficult for me to backtrack on a selection, for when I do, that horse ends up winning. Dr. Detroit left the gate running with great spirit. But somewhere on the backstretch I could see that there was something uncharacteristicly wrong with him. He was done early.
Inside information can be treacherous because each piece of data must be analyzed in context with the psychology of the purveyor of that data. Some purveyors give off a good sign when they elegantly underestimate the chances of their horse. For others, overexuberance is a telling sign that they are too subjective about the horse they "love".
In the end, what we see on paper can tell us just as much as what we hear from the trainer's or horse's mouth.

THE LAST WORD: AN UNCOMFORTABLE SUBJECT
For years we have been engaged in a drama that depends on many actors. We the players support the system. The industry could not exist without us. We need trainers, riders, grooms, exercise riders, computer experts, and this can go on and on. We tend to forget that there is one primary actor in this drama: the horse.
We also forget or simply don't pay attention to the fact that horses live on past their careers and the ones that do not enter into the breeding picture will either be cared for, left to malign neglect or slaughtered.
Mathematically it is impossible to keep all horses alive until they die a natural death. The seven-year-old claimer you bet on today may be slaughtered tomorrow.
Any time there's an effort to keep one of these magnificent animals alive in a realistic way, we should support this effort.
However, we also have to face the fact that horse slaughter is a necessary reality. We should know that humane methods of horse slaughter exist, and that any man facing execution by electric chair or lethal injection would glad choose to be a horse rather than a man at the moment of death.
While one celebrity horse has become the subject of a media soap opera, thousands of others are forgotten.
Recently, the magazine Horse & Family dedicated extensive coverage to the subject of horse slaughter. We now reprint a letter from that publication. The opinion in this letter does not represent a position of C&X on this issue. C&X only asks that we show respect for the horses we bet on, and appreciate them as living beings.
DEMAND HUMANE HANDLING
by Dale Lamminen
I am glad to see the open-minded approach of Horse & Family on the distasteful subject of horse slaughter. The area around me is becoming a mecca of 5-acre horse farms. It seems to be some kind of status symbol to be able to buy a 5 acre piece of heaven and stock it with riding horses, which are treated more as lawn ornaments than useful beings. Very few if any of the owners do any riding. This situation is not unique to my area; it is happening all over the country. The result is a glut of horses that serve no useful purpose other than represent status and ornamentation. Many of these horses are of non-descript breeding, are spoiled, not well-trained - in short, have little sale appeal.
Along with the need of people to have a horse is their desire to have a "cute little colt". So grade mares are bred to grade stallions (because it's less expensive) and a colt is born. Most people don't have any idea of the work involved in owning and training a colt and when faced with that situation they find it is beyond their ability to handle. Another spoiled, untrained horse joins the herd - a herd that is getting out of control.
Second, many horses are not fit for any useful purpose. They are foundered, have navicular or ringbone, are blind, old or have some other malady that makes them unusable. It is true that they are alive, but their quality of life is poor at best. In most cases they live because there is no cost-effective way to relieve their suffering. In my area it costs about $150 to euthanize a horse and another $150 to have it disposed of ---$300 that most people find excessive, so the poor horses suffers until it dies from neglect or illness.
Third: the glut of unused and unsound horses has a detrimental effect on the financial end of the horse business. The horse market has plummeted in the last few years. People who bought a horse a dozen years ago for $2,000 are shocked that it is only worth $500 on today's market.
It is time to look at the situation with our minds instead of our "bleeding hearts". The horse is a magnificent animal, one that I have had a lifelong pleasure to call my friend. But in order to preserve the overall health of the horse industry it is increasingly necessary to purge the weak and useless animals from the herd. In the wild herds, Mother Nature does that, and she isn't too gentle about it. We must admit that horse slaughter is necessary. That being the case, we should expend our energies to demand that transportation to the slaughterhouses and the slaughter itself be tightly regulated so that they can be done humanely.

C&X 31

CONTENTS
Editorial
Research
Player Profile: an informed minority
On perfection
Handicapping hellhole: the mother of all contests
Early speed according to Klein
He who lives by the buzz dies by the buzz
The Last Word

EDITORIAL
I have received the following messages from longtime readers, Toshe, and Dr. Billy M, hero of the 2005 Kentucky Derby.

Mark,
Other handicappers point out that Richard Matlow's stats at Del Mar are dismal, but Mark Cramer says bet his firsters. Paid $40 yesterday, and I HAD HIM!
Plus the exacta. going to Saratoga in 5 days and will be thinking of you.
bill

Hi Mark,
Years ago I was an attendee at a weekend racing seminar at Pimlico. You were one of the instructors along with Ron Ambrose and Dick Mitchell. Anyway, at Del Mar, Richard Matlow sent out a pair of debut horses in maiden claimers. Yesterday, his horse Ridingwiththeking won at 19-1. I had planned to bet it, but my wife and I took a walk into town and I completely forgot about it until later in the day when I learned the bad news. Today, he sent out Keylimepie in a $62.5K maiden claimer and he was a close second at 5-1 to the favorite, which was dropping from MSWs. Its good to see that your angles are still doing well today, and at Del Mar, too.
Best wishes in your future endeavors,
Toshi

I first published the automatic bet on Matlow's first-time starters in Thoroughbred Cycles back in 1990. The subject was trainer determinism, and this was long before most players ever considered that the trainer might be a primary factor. Subsequently, I've restated this automatic bet periodically in various issues of C&X. I would like to repeat it more often, but I'd risk being accused of recycling. Regular readers like Dr. Billy M do not forget.
Even to this very date, 16 years after I first plugged in to the Matlow phenomenon, those naysayers who demand a large sample for an automatic bet would still be waiting for Matlow and not playing him, for he only has a handfull of first-time starters each year, not enough for the required long sample.
Thus, we have the usual question about the importance of sample size. You'll be reading a review of Steve Klein's new book on early speed, in which he uses samples of extraordinary size (as large as seven figures!). You'll also read about another episode in the ongoing "Informed Minority" reseach that may never reach even a fraction of the sample size in Steve Klein's research but looks like a bettable method.
The best bets in racing, I am convinced, are those that arrive occasionally, the ones we must wait for patiently. The other ones, the ones we force because we're hungry for action, are the worst bets. Perhaps this involves a whole approach to life in which "better" does not mean "more". How we manage our time (and our betting time) is crucial to the longterm success and pleasure derived from pari-mutuel betting, unless of course you enjoy losing.
Though it does not mention horse race betting, one of the greatest books on time management is The Art of Time, by Jean-Louis Servan-Schreiber. As you would guess, this is a short book. You can never gain time, he explains, nor save it, but you can master it, and mastering time is the key to mastering ourselves.
If we could just learn to wait for the fine moments, like the Matlow moments, we would have ample resources left to take advantage of those moments and truly savor them.
Servan-Schreiber notes (with my racing additions in brackets) that "we dedicate particles of time to a multitude of pleasures [wagers] instead of profiting from the rare and splendid ones that are truly in our interest."
The quest for a large research sample implies that we are going to find an every day bets that occur several times on every race card. But a large sample may also be a shallow one. We are not advocating smaller samples but ones of deeper meaning that may be smaller simply because they do not occur all so frequently.
The pari-mutuel system seems to penalize discoveries that occur frequently because a high-frequency phenomenon is more likely to attract the attention of the public, and therefore deflate in value.
mc

RESEARCH: the Informed Minority
Any time we have a method that yields a profit but does not have a high hit rate, it is easy to get off the bandwagon at any point of discouragement, especially if this method does not offer a 10,000 race sample to go on.
In this year's Kentucky Derby, the one «informed minority» horse failed to produce. In retrospect, the public handicapper who chose that horse had never had an "informed minority" winner even if his percentage of winners is quite respectable. That said, we are not supposed to intervene in an automatic bet. Or are we? One of the original precepts of the "informed minority" is to only use handicapping grids that contain the most accomplished of public experts. At certain racing venues, the grid of public handicappers is far superior to others, so we must be selective in our choice of grid and event. This is why previous research has concentrated on grids of big events which coalesce a high-quality array of public handicappers.
The Informed Minority is research in progress. It's held its bottom-line profit through Breeders' Cups and Claiming Crowns, though it does not always have a profitable race card, and it's percentage of winners is relatively low.
For those of you who are new to C&X, the Informed Minority is a method that picks horses that are chosen by only a single public handicapper on a grid of at least seven, and preferably more. In smaller grids, the Informed Minority could be a single choice of a horse that is not chosen anywhere in the top three of the other public pickers on the grid.
In Claiming Crown 2006, there was a grid of 10 handicappers. The selections included the seven Claiming Crown races plus the Lady Canterbury for fillies and mares on the turf. There were 15 informed-minority horses on the grid: in other words, horses selected by a single public handicapper. Of those 15, there were three winners. Rounding off the returns, Al's Dearly Bred, picked by my friend and colleague Jeff Maday, paid $9.00. The other two winners were both picked by the DRF Chicago handicapper Marcus Hersh. He had Radiant Avie in the Lady Canterbury, who paid 15.00 and Tens Holy Spirit in the Tiara on the turf, who returned 28.00. The total return was $52.00 from an investment of $30.
Once more, the Informed Minority has managed to find a way. When can we start betting on this? I'd like to hear some of your opinions. You can also participate in this research by tallying the informed minority for big racing days at your local track. The only prerequisite is that we must have reputable handicappers on the grid.
Eventually, we can probably filter out the uninformed minority from those public pickers who have a true talent for going against the grain. Don, a longtime C&X reader and a former trainer, has responded to our ongoing request for readers to send us independent samples. In this case, he's gone beyond the big-racing-day format, and so his sample is of special interest; for it will tell us if we have any way to expand this bet.
Don's sample
There are some promising results to consider, and Don has done what we've suggested in previous analysis of this method: isolate the individual handicappers within the grid. Here's what he has to say.
Mark,
I'm sending this because you mentioned a lack of e-mails from readers. I did the informed minority selections for the 2006 Gulfstream Park meet. It is not complete: I missed 3 weeks in Feb when I was in new york. I also didn't have a few late results on some cards. What I do have is 297 selections separated by the individuals selecting them from the DRF with notes on secondary factors of each horse such as: blinks (on/off), Lasix, proven losers, trainer %, lay1,2,3,4, claim 1,2 etc. There were 3 DRF selectors who returned positive roi's.
Welsch 53 races 10 wins roi 1.11 ($1.11 for each dollar invested)
Gropper 56 races 7 wins roi 1.15
Peck 79 races 10 wins roi 0.97. Peck had 1 winner at $58.60, not a PL, which i purposely excluded from any calculations. I can make copies & send the results of each trainer, date, race#, name of horse w/appropriate comments if you wish. My reward & satisfaction for doing this was to compare my results w/good handicappers to try and verify that what i am doing is not a fluke and if the parameters I learned from you, C&X and Mr. Mitchell would have improved the results of their selections. It was a check on myself and I like what I found. By not being 100% accurate because I missed too many days, i wasn't going to mention this. But, if this can be of any help to you I'll be happy to send all of it. It's actually readable.
Don

Mark responds:
By all means, send this to me, Don, and thanks for helping to make C&X an interactive publication. If I understand correctly, had you not excluded Peck's $58.60 winner, he'd have had an enormous flat-bet profit. Contrary to my other research, in the informed-minority research I do not exclude the high mutuels, for, from its past history, the informed minority is supposed to pick tote blasters and does not depend on percentage of winners.
Don refers to the late Dick Mitchell, who once suggested in C&X that we could improve the roi of the Informed Minority bet by excluding all qualifying horses whose odds were not above a certain minimum requirement. This remains a possibility. Mitchell did not suggest to include any horse that was above a threshhold odds. He was aware that this method is remarkably good at picking out those rare toteblasters that keep us rolling for a long time.
Any readers who specialize in a track that has a better than competent handicappers grid would do well to keep research records and share them with us. Note that Don's discovery has isolated the more proficient longshot pickers, and it seems that this might be the best way for a regular meet where public handicappers may not be in the inspiration zone for every race card.

PLAYER PROFILE:
Marcus Hersh, the Informed Minority
The informed minority is usually unknown to us. We know his name and that's it. We don't know how he came to differ with the other public pickers. We have no idea if he's really handicapping or if he had inside information.
As a racing journalist, I get paid to dig for information. It was not hard to dig into the reasons for Marcus Hersh's two winning informed minority picks on the Claiming Crown program, for he was sitting right next to me. I just had to ask him.
His first pick came in the Lady Canterbury, a mile on the turf. The favorite was Stretching, who was coming out of a competitive Grade II race against proven classy horses. Winner of three straight 1 1/16 races, Stretching shortened up to a mile at Lone Star and couldn't get up in time when lacking room. He earned a 91 Beyer for that race and nothing else in this field came near.
Every smartass public handicapper was picking Stretching. It was intimidating for anyone who was not in the Stretching Fan Club. I feared that the come-from-behinder Stretching might not get up on time in a slow-paced field, so I went with the winner of the previous year's edition of the same race, Rue des Reves, who was a pace presser. I figured she Rue de Reves could keep close enough to the eventual leaders to have first run on the final turn. Another horse getting action was the Nafzger shipper Aimer, sporting two 87 Beyers and having won a non-winners of 2 allowance at Churchill, a classy track. The front runner figured to be Radiant Avie, whose best Beyer (at Arlington) was an 83. Like Aimer, Radiant Avie had won a non-winners of 2.
Radiant Avie was the informed-minority pick of Marcus Hersh. She went wire to wire to pay $15 and change. My horse, Rue des Reves, was farther off the pace than usual and versus the lone front runner could only manage to get up for the place. As I suspected, the favored Stretching had too much ground to make up and she was only able to catch the show spot.
(Pps of the four contenders will be included in the print edition)
"Radiant Avie was gonna get the early lead," Hersh explained. Hersh knew the horse from his Midwest handicapping. "From a form perspective, she had not yet come back to her peak of last year," Hersh added, "so there was room for improvement. Stretching, on the other hand, was third on yielding ground, and that was not enough to indicate that she should be favored."
In other words, Hersh saw the form of these horses in motion rather than static, as if each horse were on an escalator of distinct incline or decline, so he had no trouble picking a horse that had apparently raced more slowly in her last race.
Hersh's other informed-minority winner was Ten's Holy Spirit, who paid $28 and change. Once more, both the pace and form factors were in the mix of Hersh's analysis.
(Pps of Tens Holy Spirit in the print edition)
Though we understood that Canterbury Beyer ratings are often underestimated, we felt that Tens Holy Spirit had raced too slowly in her only turf win, and we observed that she had failed to win a nw1 at Tampa in two tries, only to break that barrier when switching from turf to dirt. That said, it is quite difficult for speed to hold up on the turf at Tampa, so THS could not be overly penalized for those losses.
Neverthless, it was a stretch to put a horse on top who had only won once on the grass.
Hersh reversed our logic and compared Tens Holy Spirit's recent win with the two losses.
"She had early speed in a fast pace twice at Tampa," Hersh explained. "The fact that she had won her last race from off the pace told me that she had learned, and that she now knew how to relax. In this particular race, there was going to be a fast pace, and the favorite was in post 10. Tens Holy Spirit had the advantage of the rail."
Once more, Hersh shows us a dynamic interpretation of the past performances. Rather than adding up the records from the past, he looks deeply for the movement, the progression of a horse's form and development. He's predicting change rather than continuity.
Marcus Hersh is the Midwest DRF analyst. He's calm and collected and he works intensely on every race, as I could observe first hand. Regular Chicago players might wish to tally Hersh's informed-minority picks over the long run. Like father like daughter: Hersh was there with his daughter at his side, and she was as cool and calm as he was.
Hersh is an inner directed soul who admittedly does not read the expert handicappers. He has his own ways. In my years being in the Canterbury press box, this is the first guy who ever brought his child to sit with him at work. I took notice of this for in the past, I would sometimes take my children to work and let them perceive a different world. Hersh left me other hints that he is not a follower of the crowd. A willingness to be different, in all aspects of life, may be one of the indicators of a potential informed minority.
PS. It remains to be seen if Hersh will be the sire of a horseplayer. Yours truly is at the bottom of horseplayer sire ratings, having failed to produce a horseplayer in four tries. I'm still available for another try, and my stud fee is reasonable.

ON PERFECTION
Which would you rather have? The first possibility is a wager where there is no takeout and where you have a positive expection. In other words, the track skims no money from the top of your returns. The hitch is that you can only play one combination, and it involves ten races!
The second possibility is the normal exotic, where the track takes out approximately 25% from the payout but where you can play different combinations and gain valuable leverage.
In the short run, the second possibility makes more sense, but in the long run, it is always better to play into a positive expectation scenario.
I had my one crack at the first situation. Canterbury offers an in-the-money pool bet. For 10 bucks you choose an in-the-money finisher for all 10 races on the card. If you hit all of them, you collect. You might even take down the whole pool! And if no one has it, there's a carryover. Each player is only allowed a single ticket, so a big player cannot leverage out the little guy.
This particular eve, there was approximately $3,000 in the pot. Canterbury has to be applauded for offering a wager that yields no gain for the track. It does get players to handicap all the races, and probably attracts money into the pools, so its a good marketing tool. Other tracks should see the advantage of giving something of value to the players, especially in the age of simulcasting when they don't have to play the home track card.
I had to handicap all the races anyway, since my picks were going on the in-track TV. I used all my available knowledge, which meant not only using my top picks. I had to imagine which of my contenders would be more likely to be in the money, and that meant occasionally bypassing a top choice in favor of a second or third pick.
As it turned out I had nine in the money finishers. In the other race, the conditions were for non-winners of a race in 2006. Under such conditions, you want a lightly-raced horse that is rounding into form. A horse that is 0-for-12 for the year is less likely to win a race under these conditions than a horse that's 0-for-3. The 0-for-12 horse has become a proven loser. the 0-for-3 horse still has a right to improve in his fourth race after the layoff.
My top pick, Steady Breeze, had lost only three races in 2006, with each race finding increased early speed. My second choice, Quite Bold, had only two losses in 2006.
Steady Breeze was 8 4-0-1 for the 6 ½ furlong distance while Quite Bold was 8 3-0-2 for the same specialty distance.
Steady Breeze went to an early lead with a little work to get there. He was leading all the way and seemed to gain energy in early stretch. In the late going, he was tiring but Seth Martinez went to the whip, more than what would be considered normal. Martinez was never accused of not going all out, and if you have horse in third place in your tri, you know he's not gonna give up when he knows that the horse will not win.
But in the last 20 yards ... three other horses passed Steady Breeze. The winner was Quite Bold, my second pick.
Steady Breeze was the only horse among my picks on the night's racing card that did not make it into the top three. Only one player had all 10, so he took down the whole pool. There was no consolation. This brought back fine memories: a handicapping tournament in which I finished fifth when there were four prizes, and another tournament where I finished seventh when there were six prizes.
This brings us back to the original question. We had a wager that required perfection. In every aspect of life no matter how objective it may be, even in medicine, aviation, and golf, near perfection is sufficient to succeed and to be number one. Are horse race wagers so cruel as to demand total perfection? And if saw a wager that required total perfection but that had no takeout plus a carryover (a huge positive expectation), would you dive in?
Or would you prefer a high takeout exotic bet like the Pick 3 or the trifecta, where the leverage of making various combinations and permutations can increase our chances of collecting a big payoff.
I have no answer. But from a visceral perspective I do know that I cannot resist a wager with zero takeout plus carryover in which all wagerers are competing on an even playing field.

HANDICAPPING HELLHOLE: THE MOTHER OF ALL TOURNAMENTS
At Claiming Crown and at other venues, for $2,000 to get in, you have a chance for a guaranteed $50,000, or more depending on the number of entrants. Before we look at a blow-by-blow description of this contest, sponsored by Ross Gallo and his SG Scientific Games, let's look at the rules.
One half of the $2,000 entry fee goes to prize money and the other half goes to the entrant's personal wagering that will determine his position in the final standings. With 59 entrants and considering the prize money, the sponsors of the tournament were not going to make any money. Evidently they do it for the love of the game. Mr. Gallo himself has played in such tournaments, and his sponsorship seems more like that of a player than of an entrepreneur.
As with the Canterbury whole-card-in-the-money wager, it seems that as if we have a wager with no takeout and a positive expectation.
But now, let's consider the rules. You have a $1,000 bankroll and you have eight designated races to play. You must play six of them. The menu in this particular occasion included the seven Claiming Crown races and the Lady Canterbury on the turf.
The rule that prevented yours truly from entering this contest was a requirement that you must wager 50 percent of your bankroll each time. Consider the mathematics of this rule. I have entered tournaments in which you must wager 10 percent of bankroll each day, for four days, but with 10 percent, there was some degree of maneuverability.
Dick Mitchell once wrote that 4 percent of bankroll was probably too bold for most players. Most experts in betting strategy believe that 3 percent of bankroll is a reasonably bold amount. But in Gallo's contest, it was 50 percent of bankroll!
Such requirements would force the player into a simultaneous offensive and defensive strategy; with even show bets as legitimate bankroll protectors. The player would have to balance the bold with the conservative, and save his or her bankroll for taking a few shots at high-return plays.
For me this was not handicapping but a contest of horseplaying gladiators. As the day progressed, one by one, a marquee array of famous handicappers were tapping out. This is an analytical article and not sensationalist, so the names of the celebrity players are not important.
Of the 59 entrants, only 7 players got back more than their $1,000 original bankroll. A more significant stat is that only 19 of the 59 did not tap out! A normal race track hoping to make a profit would not off such betting scenario, for with little or no churn, the track would lose the steadiest of its customers far too soon.
As a curious journalist, I could not resist the chance to interview the winner, one Michelle Davis. At the winner's ceremony she was surrounded by admirers, so I had to calculate one question that would give me some reasonably important information, in case I was swept away by the herd.
"Which particular wager got you over the top?" I asked.
"Castello d'Oro," she responded. This is the colt that won the Express and paid $71.80. Castello d'Oro had finished 14 lengths behind three other horses from this same field in his last race, at Canterbury, and those three other horses were all longshots. In his previous prep race, also at Canterbury, he'd finished fifth in a field of six, 7 lengths behind. He'd had a single win in 2006, and that was as an even money favorite in a 6-horse field at Turf Paradise.
His connections were Canterbury people.
"What factors made you choose this horse?" I asked her.
"This was a local horse," Michelle responded, "and we have to back our local product."
She sounded more like the president of the Castello d'Oro fan club than a horse race handicapper. This was hardly the answer we would expect from an enlightened handicapper. As difficult as the tournament rules were, I could not imagine that a sentimental guessing could bring down the top prize.
I followed up by asking around among experts who'd played in other tournaments. They had a mixed analysis. Some thought that the rules of the tournament would favor luck over handicapping prowess. Others suggested that the winner might be a name lender for other players who wanted more than one entry.
Whatever the case, this was no easy contest. I followed the entries of my colleague Steve Fierro. Steve recognized before entering that the rules were not optimal, and I got the sense that he had entered only as a good sport. Steve has been a Claiming Crown handicapping hero in the past, and an "informed minority" as well.
His strategy seemed about as logical as it could be, and his handicapping allowed for multiple textures and levels of investment. Steve was one of the forty who ended up with less than a buck from their original bankroll.
One might argue that the card itself was extremely difficult. There were either superfavorites whose victory would not move us along or full fields of multiple contenders which looked more like a crap shoot. But I would never blame a card of racing, and our research on the "informed minority" proves that even within near total chaos, some minds can find order.
This is a great game, and I'm thrilled that I stayed out of this one part of it. It's much more fun writing this up as a journalist than as a visitor to the gladiator pits.

EARLY SPEED:
THE ANSWER?
Review of Steve Klein's The Power of Early Speed (Daily Racing Form, $14.95).
Here at C&X we often refer to the word "objective", in order to differentiate from impressionistic or hunch handicapping. If ever there was an objective book about horse race handicapping, this is it.
With the DRF database at his disposition, Klein has studied the early speed factor with monumental samples. For example, "In the 1,671,627-horse sample, the first-call leaders won 28.4 percent of the time, and returned a $3.12 ROI (from $2), ... while those who were second at that point were still profitable at $2.13, and won 18 percent of their races."
As the position at the first call declines, so does the win percentage and the return on investment. It gets really bad for those who insist on backing deep closers. (Wouldn't you love to book their bets?)
Klein breaks down these stats in every which way: by odds categories, surface, distance, track, class, age and gender, and even trainer and jockey. For example, we learn that early speed is most effective at the lowest class levels and is slightly less effective the higher you go, but that only at Grade I does it dip below 20% winners and go slightly below a flat-bet profit. This finding corroborates my early-speed/class-drop article of many years ago. However, leading at the first call is still highly effective at all class levels.
With all these great stats (too many to repeat here), you'd think it would be easy to win at the races by betting the most-likely horse to have the lead at the first quarter fraction. However, knowing which horse will have the lead is susceptible to numerous other variables, including form cycle and class itself. Klein does his best to compensate for this missing link by coming up with a method called the "Klein Speed Points". He provides the formula and, though not simplistic, is easy to use. We all know that the Quirin speed points have long existed. Klein explains how the Quirin points, though revolutionary in their time, had certain defects, most notably the fact that they do not consider the field size factor.
In the end, there is the missing link that Klein cannot capture in a statistical way. For example, thanks to Klein, we learn that if you can select the first fraction leader in a maiden claiming race, you will end up with just above 30 percent winners and an incredible $3.62 return for each $2 invested, and his sample is 41,725 races! However, in how many of those instances could we have identified the horse that would capture the lead?
Klein's Speed Points certainly enable us to get closer to the 30 percent stat than we would have been without those Speed Points. At least one of his sample races that illustrate method (Fairgrounds, Race 8, 28 January 2005) leaves us a little thirsty for a more complex example. Mr. Meso won that race and paid $19.80 and effectively, Klein's Speed Points selected this horse. However, so did a raw comparison of the fractions of all the horses in the field. In his previous race, Mr. Meso earned a 46.4 while fourth at the second call. But all the other horses were well over 47, except for Que Candy, who tied with Mr. Meso on fractions alone.
Most of the stats are remarkably valuable, but not necessarily in the obvious way. For example, in the jockey subset of early speed stats, we find that low-percentage Canterbury rider Jordan Olesiak gives us a $13.30 roi on his early speed horses. Does this mean that he's a great rider? In fact, usually we'd eliminate a horse ridden by Olesiak. But the Klein stat tells us that this particular rider may have one asset that's underbet by the public.
Lest you think that Russel Baze should not be bet against on a early speed horse, Klein's stat tells us that Baze gets 17 percent winners from his front-running horses with a loss of 6.5 cents per dollar. Baze is still good with E horses, but not invincible.
Since we're only part into the Saratoga and Del Mar meets, let's look at which jockeys and trainers do best at these meets with front-running types, with both ROI and win percentage as necessary.
Del Mar riders:
David Flores
Alex Bisono
Saratoga rides:
JR Velazquez
Aaron Gryder
Del Mar Trainers:
Ruben Cardenas
Bruce Headley
Wesley Ward
Doug O'Neil
Saratoga Trainers:
Todd Pletcher
Scott Lake
Pletcher is a surprise. We expect him to win but we do not expect him to return a profit for his bettors. In fact, it seems as if the top trainers at Saratoga do not fail their backers, while top trainers at Del Mar are vulnerable. Bob Baffert and Jeff Mullins, for example, show a huge flat-bet loss at Del Mar with their early horses.
In using this factor, the positive roi of these above riders and trainers does not come from the obvious horses that show 1-1-1-1 in their running line, but from those that chart to get a lead, because of they earned fast fractions in races where they did not have the lead or because they are improving in form and increasingly better early speed so that they can be projected to get off to a faster start today than they did in their previous race.
Best distance: Del Mar
As for distances where a front running effort has the best return, at Del Mar, by far, it's the 5 1/2 sprint, as well as routes of 1 1/16 and 1 1/8. These distances combine a high win percentage, above 30 percent, with a high return on investment. You double your money at the 5 1/2 and you triple your money in the routes.
Best distance: Saratoga
Saratoga is less friendly to front running speed, with the 5 and 5 1/2 furlong sprints as the best bets. In Saratoga, the rains often come. Only a "muddy" designation moves up the front speed, with "sloppy" and "good" providing less of an advantage, but still better for the speed than for the closers.
As you can see from these small references, there is a wealth of useful statistics in Klein's book. Both the Klein Speed Points and his method for calculating track bias are worthy and elegant additions to the literature and science of horse race handicapping. These two methods combined with the rich reservoir of research stats make this book far more valuable than its cover price.

THIN SLICING AND THIN STATS
In the ongoing discussion, this issue, of sample size, allow me to refer to Race 5, Canterbury, July 14. It looked like a competitive race at OC 25k/N1X. I was sitting at the bar in conversation with two readers and the groom of a Claiming Crown horse. Normally for me, socializing and betting do not mix. I'm not a born multi-tasker, though I often have to do it anyway.
So in social situations, I usually do not bet. In this case, the conversation shifted to this race, which I found too competitive from a handicapping point of view.
In races where anything can happen, I look for "the different horse". There was one. The horse had never before been on the dirt. What was he doing in this field?
Naturally I looked down at the trainer stats for an answer. One statistic popped off the page. The trainer of the 2-horse Pawnsay, Mack Robertson, had an unusual stat. Normally he's a steady 21 trainer, but everyone knows about him so he's not a profitable bet.
But Robertson's 6-1 horse had been on the turf for all of his five career races, and one particular stat would tell me if I should pursue this matter.
Robertson Turf/Dirt (31 .35 $2.14)
Compare the above Robertson stat to his other stats from Pawnsay's and other pps on the card:
Dirt (276 .22 $156)
Sprint (250 .22 $1.59)
Turf (116 .24 $1.68)
Alw (108 .18 $1.35)
Dirt/Turf (42 .10 $0.65)
The turf-to-dirt stat offered a huge contrast against all the others. Most striking for me was the contrast between Dirt/Turf and Turf/Dirt!
Surely there were other factors in the race, much more complex than this one. But among the other six horses there were no positive trainers stats (with one small exception), and all the other trainer stats had ROIs that were worse than what one would lose by random betting.
On the basis of this one piece of logic, one single trainer stat with only a 31-race sample, I made an action bet on the Robertson horse. The horse won, paying off at nearly 7-1.
There are two issues here. One is the small sample. In order to get a large turf-to-dirt sample for Robertson, I'd have to wait through his lifetime and maybe if his son inherited the trainer job, I might be able to continue the stat, and maybe it would be a play after the grandson continued the stat. Either I would lose the small sample, or discard it.
The other issue is "thin slicing", a term we horseplayers used long before it became a buzz word in a best-selling book. We called it an "angle". Sure, an angle slices thinly through the complexity of the past performances, doesn't it? With the betting public doing a damn good job at collective and comprehensive handicapping, it certainly is difficult to confront the betting public as a standing army: head-on. Thin slicing is more equivalent to guerrilla warfare. We attack only when the standing army is too clumsy and when we are more agile.
By definition, winning in a pari-mutuel situation requires using a different approach from the sophisticated crowd, for the crowd's analysis is overbet and underpaid. Thin slicing, when applied elegantly and with agility, seems to be a good answer. But there are two obstacles.
The first is that we cannot force it. We will lose if we play every single angle. There are too many of them. Had Robertson's stats been positive in all categories, then the value of this one category would have been diminished or neutralized. We have to sense when one angle rises above all the rest. In this Robertson case, it was not only the one simple stat but also the contrast with his other stats.
The second obstacle runs deeper. We have been conditioned to comprehensive handicapping. It is a quasi-religious and cultural conditioning. It is sinful to not handicap in the accepted way. I am trained in the theme of culture, conditioning and the willingness of human beings to change. I write books about the subject. Changing one's ways means demolishing immense psychic barriers within us. It's not easy. To be a successful angle player, we not only have to cross the border out of the country of comprehensive handicapping but we cannot trust everything we see on the other side of the border. We have to be selective.
It won't do us any good to demolish the barriers of conventional handicapping if we dive in and play all angles indiscriminately. The trainer stats relating to this particular Robertson horse, serve as a clear example of one case in which teh angle superseded everything else.

HE WHO LIVES BY THE BUZZ DIES BY THE BUZZ
Three Claiming Crowns ago, in 2004, I picked a $20 winner on the C&X website, by the name of Chisholm. On Thursday I found myself playing against Chisholm. Since his win, he has spiraled to a new bottom. He had not one a single race in 2005 or 2006. In looking back, the reason I was able to put Chisholm on top came from inside information, directly from the trainer.
But when one hangs around the track and gets bombarded by insider information, the end result can be catastrophic. Some trainers and owners "like" their horses in a way that is even more subjective than the way we bettors "like" a horse. In reviewing my Claiming Crown analysis for the past two years, I can safely conclude that the Chisholm win caused me to overestimate the value of inside information.
Two painful examples come to mind. In this year's the Express, I had put the Richard Englander horse Whose Career on top. Englander is a hands-on owner who works directly with his owners, and claims are made with this owner's approval. The highly successful Englander's exhuberance for the horse [we had once done of profile of Englander in C&X] was seductive. But when I saw that the horse's 12-1 morning line had crumbled to 5-1, in large part thanks to Englander's own money and his broadcast enthusiasm for the horse, I realized, too late, that I'd stumbled into a trap. You cannot make money playing horses that should be at least 8-1 or 9-1 for fair odds when they are bet down to 5-1 or 6-1. If the horse had won, I'd have breathed a sigh of relief, knowing it was a pick three inclusion that I should not have depended on.
In the following race, The Emerald, I had put Dr. Detroit on top of my second choice Al's Dearly Bred, the eventual winner. The reason for making this choice was the eloquent assistant trainer's seemingly objective description of Dr. Detroit's physical condition.
But Antonio also told me that Dr. Detroit had a problem with hot weather because he did not sweat. At the moment I typed in my choices for the race, the weather forecast had downgraded the heat warning, it had cooled off outside, and we were expecting a reasonable 90 degrees followed by a cool-off.
But after my picks and posts were in, the weather forecasters went back to their original predictions of plus 95 temperatures. It is difficult for me to backtrack on a selection, for when I do, that horse ends up winning. Dr. Detroit left the gate running with great spirit. But somewhere on the backstretch I could see that there was something uncharacteristicly wrong with him. He was done early.
Inside information can be treacherous because each piece of data must be analyzed in context with the psychology of the purveyor of that data. Some purveyors give off a good sign when they elegantly underestimate the chances of their horse. For others, overexuberance is a telling sign that they are too subjective about the horse they "love".
In the end, what we see on paper can tell us just as much as what we hear from the trainer's or horse's mouth.

THE LAST WORD: AN UNCOMFORTABLE SUBJECT
For years we have been engaged in a drama that depends on many actors. We the players support the system. The industry could not exist without us. We need trainers, riders, grooms, exercise riders, computer experts, and this can go on and on. We tend to forget that there is one primary actor in this drama: the horse.
We also forget or simply don't pay attention to the fact that horses live on past their careers and the ones that do not enter into the breeding picture will either be cared for, left to malign neglect or slaughtered.
Mathematically it is impossible to keep all horses alive until they die a natural death. The seven-year-old claimer you bet on today may be slaughtered tomorrow.
Any time there's an effort to keep one of these magnificent animals alive in a realistic way, we should support this effort.
However, we also have to face the fact that horse slaughter is a necessary reality. We should know that humane methods of horse slaughter exist, and that any man facing execution by electric chair or lethal injection would glad choose to be a horse rather than a man at the moment of death.
While one celebrity horse has become the subject of a media soap opera, thousands of others are forgotten.
Recently, the magazine Horse & Family dedicated extensive coverage to the subject of horse slaughter. We now reprint a letter from that publication. The opinion in this letter does not represent a position of C&X on this issue. C&X only asks that we show respect for the horses we bet on, and appreciate them as living beings.
DEMAND HUMANE HANDLING
by Dale Lamminen
I am glad to see the open-minded approach of Horse & Family on the distasteful subject of horse slaughter. The area around me is becoming a mecca of 5-acre horse farms. It seems to be some kind of status symbol to be able to buy a 5 acre piece of heaven and stock it with riding horses, which are treated more as lawn ornaments than useful beings. Very few if any of the owners do any riding. This situation is not unique to my area; it is happening all over the country. The result is a glut of horses that serve no useful purpose other than represent status and ornamentation. Many of these horses are of non-descript breeding, are spoiled, not well-trained - in short, have little sale appeal.
Along with the need of people to have a horse is their desire to have a "cute little colt". So grade mares are bred to grade stallions (because it's less expensive) and a colt is born. Most people don't have any idea of the work involved in owning and training a colt and when faced with that situation they find it is beyond their ability to handle. Another spoiled, untrained horse joins the herd - a herd that is getting out of control.
Second, many horses are not fit for any useful purpose. They are foundered, have navicular or ringbone, are blind, old or have some other malady that makes them unusable. It is true that they are alive, but their quality of life is poor at best. In most cases they live because there is no cost-effective way to relieve their suffering. In my area it costs about $150 to euthanize a horse and another $150 to have it disposed of ---$300 that most people find excessive, so the poor horses suffers until it dies from neglect or illness.
Third: the glut of unused and unsound horses has a detrimental effect on the financial end of the horse business. The horse market has plummeted in the last few years. People who bought a horse a dozen years ago for $2,000 are shocked that it is only worth $500 on today's market.
It is time to look at the situation with our minds instead of our "bleeding hearts". The horse is a magnificent animal, one that I have had a lifelong pleasure to call my friend. But in order to preserve the overall health of the horse industry it is increasingly necessary to purge the weak and useless animals from the herd. In the wild herds, Mother Nature does that, and she isn't too gentle about it. We must admit that horse slaughter is necessary. That being the case, we should expend our energies to demand that transportation to the slaughterhouses and the slaughter itself be tightly regulated so that they can be done humanely.

C&X 31
CONTENTS
Editorial
Research
Player Profile: an informed minority
On perfection
Handicapping hellhole: the mother of all contests
Early speed according to Klein
He who lives by the buzz dies by the buzz
The Last Word
EDITORIAL
I have received the following messages from longtime readers, Toshe, and Dr. Billy M, hero of the 2005 Kentucky Derby.
Mark,
Other handicappers point out that Richard Matlow's stats at Del Mar are dismal, but Mark Cramer says bet his firsters. Paid $40 yesterday, and I HAD HIM!
Plus the exacta. going to Saratoga in 5 days and will be thinking of you.
bill
Hi Mark,Years ago I was an attendee at a weekend racing seminar at Pimlico. You were one of the instructors along with Ron Ambrose and Dick Mitchell. Anyway, at Del Mar, Richard Matlow sent out a pair of debut horses in maiden claimers. Yesterday, his horse Ridingwiththeking won at 19-1. I had planned to bet it, but my wife and I took a walk into town and I completely forgot about it until later in the day when I learned the bad news. Today, he sent out Keylimepie in a $62.5K maiden claimer and he was a close second at 5-1 to the favorite, which was dropping from MSWs. Its good to see that your angles are still doing well today, and at Del Mar, too.Best wishes in your future endeavors,Toshi
I first published the automatic bet on Matlow's first-time starters in Thoroughbred Cycles back in 1990. The subject was trainer determinism, and this was long before most players ever considered that the trainer might be a primary factor. Subsequently, I've restated this automatic bet periodically in various issues of C&X. I would like to repeat it more often, but I'd risk being accused of recycling. Regular readers like Dr. Billy M do not forget.
Even to this very date, 16 years after I first plugged in to the Matlow phenomenon, those naysayers who demand a large sample for an automatic bet would still be waiting for Matlow and not playing him, for he only has a handfull of first-time starters each year, not enough for the required long sample.
Thus, we have the usual question about the importance of sample size. You'll be reading a review of Steve Klein's new book on early speed, in which he uses samples of extraordinary size (as large as seven figures!). You'll also read about another episode in the ongoing "Informed Minority" reseach that may never reach even a fraction of the sample size in Steve Klein's research but looks like a bettable method.
The best bets in racing, I am convinced, are those that arrive occasionally, the ones we must wait for patiently. The other ones, the ones we force because we're hungry for action, are the worst bets. Perhaps this involves a whole approach to life in which "better" does not mean "more". How we manage our time (and our betting time) is crucial to the longterm success and pleasure derived from pari-mutuel betting, unless of course you enjoy losing.
Though it does not mention horse race betting, one of the greatest books on time management is The Art of Time, by Jean-Louis Servan-Schreiber. As you would guess, this is a short book. You can never gain time, he explains, nor save it, but you can master it, and mastering time is the key to mastering ourselves.
If we could just learn to wait for the fine moments, like the Matlow moments, we would have ample resources left to take advantage of those moments and truly savor them.
Servan-Schreiber notes (with my racing additions in brackets) that "we dedicate particles of time to a multitude of pleasures [wagers] instead of profiting from the rare and splendid ones that are truly in our interest."
The quest for a large research sample implies that we are going to find an every day bets that occur several times on every race card. But a large sample may also be a shallow one. We are not advocating smaller samples but ones of deeper meaning that may be smaller simply because they do not occur all so frequently.
The pari-mutuel system seems to penalize discoveries that occur frequently because a high-frequency phenomenon is more likely to attract the attention of the public, and therefore deflate in value.
mc
RESEARCH: the Informed Minority
Any time we have a method that yields a profit but does not have a high hit rate, it is easy to get off the bandwagon at any point of discouragement, especially if this method does not offer a 10,000 race sample to go on.
In this year's Kentucky Derby, the one «informed minority» horse failed to produce. In retrospect, the public handicapper who chose that horse had never had an "informed minority" winner even if his percentage of winners is quite respectable. That said, we are not supposed to intervene in an automatic bet. Or are we? One of the original precepts of the "informed minority" is to only use handicapping grids that contain the most accomplished of public experts. At certain racing venues, the grid of public handicappers is far superior to others, so we must be selective in our choice of grid and event. This is why previous research has concentrated on grids of big events which coalesce a high-quality array of public handicappers.
The Informed Minority is research in progress. It's held its bottom-line profit through Breeders' Cups and Claiming Crowns, though it does not always have a profitable race card, and it's percentage of winners is relatively low.
For those of you who are new to C&X, the Informed Minority is a method that picks horses that are chosen by only a single public handicapper on a grid of at least seven, and preferably more. In smaller grids, the Informed Minority could be a single choice of a horse that is not chosen anywhere in the top three of the other public pickers on the grid.
In Claiming Crown 2006, there was a grid of 10 handicappers. The selections included the seven Claiming Crown races plus the Lady Canterbury for fillies and mares on the turf. There were 15 informed-minority horses on the grid: in other words, horses selected by a single public handicapper. Of those 15, there were three winners. Rounding off the returns, Al's Dearly Bred, picked by my friend and colleague Jeff Maday, paid $9.00. The other two winners were both picked by the DRF Chicago handicapper Marcus Hersh. He had Radiant Avie in the Lady Canterbury, who paid 15.00 and Tens Holy Spirit in the Tiara on the turf, who returned 28.00. The total return was $52.00 from an investment of $30.
Once more, the Informed Minority has managed to find a way. When can we start betting on this? I'd like to hear some of your opinions. You can also participate in this research by tallying the informed minority for big racing days at your local track. The only prerequisite is that we must have reputable handicappers on the grid.
Eventually, we can probably filter out the uninformed minority from those public pickers who have a true talent for going against the grain. Don, a longtime C&X reader and a former trainer, has responded to our ongoing request for readers to send us independent samples. In this case, he's gone beyond the big-racing-day format, and so his sample is of special interest; for it will tell us if we have any way to expand this bet.
Don's sample
There are some promising results to consider, and Don has done what we've suggested in previous analysis of this method: isolate the individual handicappers within the grid. Here's what he has to say.
Mark,
I'm sending this because you mentioned a lack of e-mails from readers. I did the informed minority selections for the 2006 Gulfstream Park meet. It is not complete: I missed 3 weeks in Feb when I was in new york. I also didn't have a few late results on some cards. What I do have is 297 selections separated by the individuals selecting them from the DRF with notes on secondary factors of each horse such as: blinks (on/off), Lasix, proven losers, trainer %, lay1,2,3,4, claim 1,2 etc. There were 3 DRF selectors who returned positive roi's.
Welsch 53 races 10 wins roi 1.11 ($1.11 for each dollar invested)
Gropper 56 races 7 wins roi 1.15
Peck 79 races 10 wins roi 0.97. Peck had 1 winner at $58.60, not a PL, which i purposely excluded from any calculations. I can make copies & send the results of each trainer, date, race#, name of horse w/appropriate comments if you wish. My reward & satisfaction for doing this was to compare my results w/good handicappers to try and verify that what i am doing is not a fluke and if the parameters I learned from you, C&X and Mr. Mitchell would have improved the results of their selections. It was a check on myself and I like what I found. By not being 100% accurate because I missed too many days, i wasn't going to mention this. But, if this can be of any help to you I'll be happy to send all of it. It's actually readable.
Don
Mark responds:
By all means, send this to me, Don, and thanks for helping to make C&X an interactive publication. If I understand correctly, had you not excluded Peck's $58.60 winner, he'd have had an enormous flat-bet profit. Contrary to my other research, in the informed-minority research I do not exclude the high mutuels, for, from its past history, the informed minority is supposed to pick tote blasters and does not depend on percentage of winners.
Don refers to the late Dick Mitchell, who once suggested in C&X that we could improve the roi of the Informed Minority bet by excluding all qualifying horses whose odds were not above a certain minimum requirement. This remains a possibility. Mitchell did not suggest to include any horse that was above a threshhold odds. He was aware that this method is remarkably good at picking out those rare toteblasters that keep us rolling for a long time.
Any readers who specialize in a track that has a better than competent handicappers grid would do well to keep research records and share them with us. Note that Don's discovery has isolated the more proficient longshot pickers, and it seems that this might be the best way for a regular meet where public handicappers may not be in the inspiration zone for every race card.
PLAYER PROFILE:
Marcus Hersh, the Informed Minority
The informed minority is usually unknown to us. We know his name and that's it. We don't know how he came to differ with the other public pickers. We have no idea if he's really handicapping or if he had inside information.
As a racing journalist, I get paid to dig for information. It was not hard to dig into the reasons for Marcus Hersh's two winning informed minority picks on the Claiming Crown program, for he was sitting right next to me. I just had to ask him.
His first pick came in the Lady Canterbury, a mile on the turf. The favorite was Stretching, who was coming out of a competitive Grade II race against proven classy horses. Winner of three straight 1 1/16 races, Stretching shortened up to a mile at Lone Star and couldn't get up in time when lacking room. He earned a 91 Beyer for that race and nothing else in this field came near.
Every smartass public handicapper was picking Stretching. It was intimidating for anyone who was not in the Stretching Fan Club. I feared that the come-from-behinder Stretching might not get up on time in a slow-paced field, so I went with the winner of the previous year's edition of the same race, Rue des Reves, who was a pace presser. I figured she Rue de Reves could keep close enough to the eventual leaders to have first run on the final turn. Another horse getting action was the Nafzger shipper Aimer, sporting two 87 Beyers and having won a non-winners of 2 allowance at Churchill, a classy track. The front runner figured to be Radiant Avie, whose best Beyer (at Arlington) was an 83. Like Aimer, Radiant Avie had won a non-winners of 2.
Radiant Avie was the informed-minority pick of Marcus Hersh. She went wire to wire to pay $15 and change. My horse, Rue des Reves, was farther off the pace than usual and versus the lone front runner could only manage to get up for the place. As I suspected, the favored Stretching had too much ground to make up and she was only able to catch the show spot.
(Pps of the four contenders will be included in the print edition)
"Radiant Avie was gonna get the early lead," Hersh explained. Hersh knew the horse from his Midwest handicapping. "From a form perspective, she had not yet come back to her peak of last year," Hersh added, "so there was room for improvement. Stretching, on the other hand, was third on yielding ground, and that was not enough to indicate that she should be favored."
In other words, Hersh saw the form of these horses in motion rather than static, as if each horse were on an escalator of distinct incline or decline, so he had no trouble picking a horse that had apparently raced more slowly in her last race.
Hersh's other informed-minority winner was Ten's Holy Spirit, who paid $28 and change. Once more, both the pace and form factors were in the mix of Hersh's analysis.
(Pps of Tens Holy Spirit in the print edition)
Though we understood that Canterbury Beyer ratings are often underestimated, we felt that Tens Holy Spirit had raced too slowly in her only turf win, and we observed that she had failed to win a nw1 at Tampa in two tries, only to break that barrier when switching from turf to dirt. That said, it is quite difficult for speed to hold up on the turf at Tampa, so THS could not be overly penalized for those losses.
Neverthless, it was a stretch to put a horse on top who had only won once on the grass.
Hersh reversed our logic and compared Tens Holy Spirit's recent win with the two losses.
"She had early speed in a fast pace twice at Tampa," Hersh explained. "The fact that she had won her last race from off the pace told me that she had learned, and that she now knew how to relax. In this particular race, there was going to be a fast pace, and the favorite was in post 10. Tens Holy Spirit had the advantage of the rail."
Once more, Hersh shows us a dynamic interpretation of the past performances. Rather than adding up the records from the past, he looks deeply for the movement, the progression of a horse's form and development. He's predicting change rather than continuity.
Marcus Hersh is the Midwest DRF analyst. He's calm and collected and he works intensely on every race, as I could observe first hand. Regular Chicago players might wish to tally Hersh's informed-minority picks over the long run. Like father like daughter: Hersh was there with his daughter at his side, and she was as cool and calm as he was.
Hersh is an inner directed soul who admittedly does not read the expert handicappers. He has his own ways. In my years being in the Canterbury press box, this is the first guy who ever brought his child to sit with him at work. I took notice of this for in the past, I would sometimes take my children to work and let them perceive a different world. Hersh left me other hints that he is not a follower of the crowd. A willingness to be different, in all aspects of life, may be one of the indicators of a potential informed minority.
PS. It remains to be seen if Hersh will be the sire of a horseplayer. Yours truly is at the bottom of horseplayer sire ratings, having failed to produce a horseplayer in four tries. I'm still available for another try, and my stud fee is reasonable.
ON PERFECTION
Which would you rather have? The first possibility is a wager where there is no takeout and where you have a positive expection. In other words, the track skims no money from the top of your returns. The hitch is that you can only play one combination, and it involves ten races!
The second possibility is the normal exotic, where the track takes out approximately 25% from the payout but where you can play different combinations and gain valuable leverage.
In the short run, the second possibility makes more sense, but in the long run, it is always better to play into a positive expectation scenario.
I had my one crack at the first situation. Canterbury offers an in-the-money pool bet. For 10 bucks you choose an in-the-money finisher for all 10 races on the card. If you hit all of them, you collect. You might even take down the whole pool! And if no one has it, there's a carryover. Each player is only allowed a single ticket, so a big player cannot leverage out the little guy.
This particular eve, there was approximately $3,000 in the pot. Canterbury has to be applauded for offering a wager that yields no gain for the track. It does get players to handicap all the races, and probably attracts money into the pools, so its a good marketing tool. Other tracks should see the advantage of giving something of value to the players, especially in the age of simulcasting when they don't have to play the home track card.
I had to handicap all the races anyway, since my picks were going on the in-track TV. I used all my available knowledge, which meant not only using my top picks. I had to imagine which of my contenders would be more likely to be in the money, and that meant occasionally bypassing a top choice in favor of a second or third pick.
As it turned out I had nine in the money finishers. In the other race, the conditions were for non-winners of a race in 2006. Under such conditions, you want a lightly-raced horse that is rounding into form. A horse that is 0-for-12 for the year is less likely to win a race under these conditions than a horse that's 0-for-3. The 0-for-12 horse has become a proven loser. the 0-for-3 horse still has a right to improve in his fourth race after the layoff.
My top pick, Steady Breeze, had lost only three races in 2006, with each race finding increased early speed. My second choice, Quite Bold, had only two losses in 2006.
Steady Breeze was 8 4-0-1 for the 6 ½ furlong distance while Quite Bold was 8 3-0-2 for the same specialty distance.
Steady Breeze went to an early lead with a little work to get there. He was leading all the way and seemed to gain energy in early stretch. In the late going, he was tiring but Seth Martinez went to the whip, more than what would be considered normal. Martinez was never accused of not going all out, and if you have horse in third place in your tri, you know he's not gonna give up when he knows that the horse will not win.
But in the last 20 yards ... three other horses passed Steady Breeze. The winner was Quite Bold, my second pick.
Steady Breeze was the only horse among my picks on the night's racing card that did not make it into the top three. Only one player had all 10, so he took down the whole pool. There was no consolation. This brought back fine memories: a handicapping tournament in which I finished fifth when there were four prizes, and another tournament where I finished seventh when there were six prizes.
This brings us back to the original question. We had a wager that required perfection. In every aspect of life no matter how objective it may be, even in medicine, aviation, and golf, near perfection is sufficient to succeed and to be number one. Are horse race wagers so cruel as to demand total perfection? And if saw a wager that required total perfection but that had no takeout plus a carryover (a huge positive expectation), would you dive in?
Or would you prefer a high takeout exotic bet like the Pick 3 or the trifecta, where the leverage of making various combinations and permutations can increase our chances of collecting a big payoff.
I have no answer. But from a visceral perspective I do know that I cannot resist a wager with zero takeout plus carryover in which all wagerers are competing on an even playing field.
HANDICAPPING HELLHOLE: THE MOTHER OF ALL TOURNAMENTS
At Claiming Crown and at other venues, for $2,000 to get in, you have a chance for a guaranteed $50,000, or more depending on the number of entrants. Before we look at a blow-by-blow description of this contest, sponsored by Ross Gallo and his SG Scientific Games, let's look at the rules.
One half of the $2,000 entry fee goes to prize money and the other half goes to the entrant's personal wagering that will determine his position in the final standings. With 59 entrants and considering the prize money, the sponsors of the tournament were not going to make any money. Evidently they do it for the love of the game. Mr. Gallo himself has played in such tournaments, and his sponsorship seems more like that of a player than of an entrepreneur.
As with the Canterbury whole-card-in-the-money wager, it seems that as if we have a wager with no takeout and a positive expectation.
But now, let's consider the rules. You have a $1,000 bankroll and you have eight designated races to play. You must play six of them. The menu in this particular occasion included the seven Claiming Crown races and the Lady Canterbury on the turf.
The rule that prevented yours truly from entering this contest was a requirement that you must wager 50 percent of your bankroll each time. Consider the mathematics of this rule. I have entered tournaments in which you must wager 10 percent of bankroll each day, for four days, but with 10 percent, there was some degree of maneuverability.
Dick Mitchell once wrote that 4 percent of bankroll was probably too bold for most players. Most experts in betting strategy believe that 3 percent of bankroll is a reasonably bold amount. But in Gallo's contest, it was 50 percent of bankroll!
Such requirements would force the player into a simultaneous offensive and defensive strategy; with even show bets as legitimate bankroll protectors. The player would have to balance the bold with the conservative, and save his or her bankroll for taking a few shots at high-return plays.
For me this was not handicapping but a contest of horseplaying gladiators. As the day progressed, one by one, a marquee array of famous handicappers were tapping out. This is an analytical article and not sensationalist, so the names of the celebrity players are not important.
Of the 59 entrants, only 7 players got back more than their $1,000 original bankroll. A more significant stat is that only 19 of the 59 did not tap out! A normal race track hoping to make a profit would not off such betting scenario, for with little or no churn, the track would lose the steadiest of its customers far too soon.
As a curious journalist, I could not resist the chance to interview the winner, one Michelle Davis. At the winner's ceremony she was surrounded by admirers, so I had to calculate one question that would give me some reasonably important information, in case I was swept away by the herd.
"Which particular wager got you over the top?" I asked.
"Castello d'Oro," she responded. This is the colt that won the Express and paid $71.80. Castello d'Oro had finished 14 lengths behind three other horses from this same field in his last race, at Canterbury, and those three other horses were all longshots. In his previous prep race, also at Canterbury, he'd finished fifth in a field of six, 7 lengths behind. He'd had a single win in 2006, and that was as an even money favorite in a 6-horse field at Turf Paradise.
His connections were Canterbury people.
"What factors made you choose this horse?" I asked her.
"This was a local horse," Michelle responded, "and we have to back our local product."
She sounded more like the president of the Castello d'Oro fan club than a horse race handicapper. This was hardly the answer we would expect from an enlightened handicapper. As difficult as the tournament rules were, I could not imagine that a sentimental guessing could bring down the top prize.
I followed up by asking around among experts who'd played in other tournaments. They had a mixed analysis. Some thought that the rules of the tournament would favor luck over handicapping prowess. Others suggested that the winner might be a name lender for other players who wanted more than one entry.
Whatever the case, this was no easy contest. I followed the entries of my colleague Steve Fierro. Steve recognized before entering that the rules were not optimal, and I got the sense that he had entered only as a good sport. Steve has been a Claiming Crown handicapping hero in the past, and an "informed minority" as well.
His strategy seemed about as logical as it could be, and his handicapping allowed for multiple textures and levels of investment. Steve was one of the forty who ended up with less than a buck from their original bankroll.
One might argue that the card itself was extremely difficult. There were either superfavorites whose victory would not move us along or full fields of multiple contenders which looked more like a crap shoot. But I would never blame a card of racing, and our research on the "informed minority" proves that even within near total chaos, some minds can find order.
This is a great game, and I'm thrilled that I stayed out of this one part of it. It's much more fun writing this up as a journalist than as a visitor to the gladiator pits.
EARLY SPEED:
THE ANSWER?
Review of Steve Klein's The Power of Early Speed (Daily Racing Form, $14.95).
Here at C&X we often refer to the word "objective", in order to differentiate from impressionistic or hunch handicapping. If ever there was an objective book about horse race handicapping, this is it.
With the DRF database at his disposition, Klein has studied the early speed factor with monumental samples. For example, "In the 1,671,627-horse sample, the first-call leaders won 28.4 percent of the time, and returned a $3.12 ROI (from $2), ... while those who were second at that point were still profitable at $2.13, and won 18 percent of their races."
As the position at the first call declines, so does the win percentage and the return on investment. It gets really bad for those who insist on backing deep closers. (Wouldn't you love to book their bets?)
Klein breaks down these stats in every which way: by odds categories, surface, distance, track, class, age and gender, and even trainer and jockey. For example, we learn that early speed is most effective at the lowest class levels and is slightly less effective the higher you go, but that only at Grade I does it dip below 20% winners and go slightly below a flat-bet profit. This finding corroborates my early-speed/class-drop article of many years ago. However, leading at the first call is still highly effective at all class levels.
With all these great stats (too many to repeat here), you'd think it would be easy to win at the races by betting the most-likely horse to have the lead at the first quarter fraction. However, knowing which horse will have the lead is susceptible to numerous other variables, including form cycle and class itself. Klein does his best to compensate for this missing link by coming up with a method called the "Klein Speed Points". He provides the formula and, though not simplistic, is easy to use. We all know that the Quirin speed points have long existed. Klein explains how the Quirin points, though revolutionary in their time, had certain defects, most notably the fact that they do not consider the field size factor.
In the end, there is the missing link that Klein cannot capture in a statistical way. For example, thanks to Klein, we learn that if you can select the first fraction leader in a maiden claiming race, you will end up with just above 30 percent winners and an incredible $3.62 return for each $2 invested, and his sample is 41,725 races! However, in how many of those instances could we have identified the horse that would capture the lead?
Klein's Speed Points certainly enable us to get closer to the 30 percent stat than we would have been without those Speed Points. At least one of his sample races that illustrate method (Fairgrounds, Race 8, 28 January 2005) leaves us a little thirsty for a more complex example. Mr. Meso won that race and paid $19.80 and effectively, Klein's Speed Points selected this horse. However, so did a raw comparison of the fractions of all the horses in the field. In his previous race, Mr. Meso earned a 46.4 while fourth at the second call. But all the other horses were well over 47, except for Que Candy, who tied with Mr. Meso on fractions alone.
Most of the stats are remarkably valuable, but not necessarily in the obvious way. For example, in the jockey subset of early speed stats, we find that low-percentage Canterbury rider Jordan Olesiak gives us a $13.30 roi on his early speed horses. Does this mean that he's a great rider? In fact, usually we'd eliminate a horse ridden by Olesiak. But the Klein stat tells us that this particular rider may have one asset that's underbet by the public.
Lest you think that Russel Baze should not be bet against on a early speed horse, Klein's stat tells us that Baze gets 17 percent winners from his front-running horses with a loss of 6.5 cents per dollar. Baze is still good with E horses, but not invincible.
Since we're only part into the Saratoga and Del Mar meets, let's look at which jockeys and trainers do best at these meets with front-running types, with both ROI and win percentage as necessary.
Del Mar riders:
David Flores
Alex Bisono
Saratoga rides:
JR Velazquez
Aaron Gryder
Del Mar Trainers:
Ruben Cardenas
Bruce Headley
Wesley Ward
Doug O'Neil
Saratoga Trainers:
Todd Pletcher
Scott Lake
Pletcher is a surprise. We expect him to win but we do not expect him to return a profit for his bettors. In fact, it seems as if the top trainers at Saratoga do not fail their backers, while top trainers at Del Mar are vulnerable. Bob Baffert and Jeff Mullins, for example, show a huge flat-bet loss at Del Mar with their early horses.
In using this factor, the positive roi of these above riders and trainers does not come from the obvious horses that show 1-1-1-1 in their running line, but from those that chart to get a lead, because of they earned fast fractions in races where they did not have the lead or because they are improving in form and increasingly better early speed so that they can be projected to get off to a faster start today than they did in their previous race.
Best distance: Del Mar
As for distances where a front running effort has the best return, at Del Mar, by far, it's the 5 1/2 sprint, as well as routes of 1 1/16 and 1 1/8. These distances combine a high win percentage, above 30 percent, with a high return on investment. You double your money at the 5 1/2 and you triple your money in the routes.
Best distance: Saratoga
Saratoga is less friendly to front running speed, with the 5 and 5 1/2 furlong sprints as the best bets. In Saratoga, the rains often come. Only a "muddy" designation moves up the front speed, with "sloppy" and "good" providing less of an advantage, but still better for the speed than for the closers.
As you can see from these small references, there is a wealth of useful statistics in Klein's book. Both the Klein Speed Points and his method for calculating track bias are worthy and elegant additions to the literature and science of horse race handicapping. These two methods combined with the rich reservoir of research stats make this book far more valuable than its cover price.
THIN SLICING AND THIN STATS
In the ongoing discussion, this issue, of sample size, allow me to refer to Race 5, Canterbury, July 14. It looked like a competitive race at OC 25k/N1X. I was sitting at the bar in conversation with two readers and the groom of a Claiming Crown horse. Normally for me, socializing and betting do not mix. I'm not a born multi-tasker, though I often have to do it anyway.
So in social situations, I usually do not bet. In this case, the conversation shifted to this race, which I found too competitive from a handicapping point of view.
In races where anything can happen, I look for "the different horse". There was one. The horse had never before been on the dirt. What was he doing in this field?
Naturally I looked down at the trainer stats for an answer. One statistic popped off the page. The trainer of the 2-horse Pawnsay, Mack Robertson, had an unusual stat. Normally he's a steady 21 trainer, but everyone knows about him so he's not a profitable bet.
But Robertson's 6-1 horse had been on the turf for all of his five career races, and one particular stat would tell me if I should pursue this matter.
Robertson Turf/Dirt (31 .35 $2.14)
Compare the above Robertson stat to his other stats from Pawnsay's and other pps on the card:
Dirt (276 .22 $156)
Sprint (250 .22 $1.59)
Turf (116 .24 $1.68)
Alw (108 .18 $1.35)
Dirt/Turf (42 .10 $0.65)
The turf-to-dirt stat offered a huge contrast against all the others. Most striking for me was the contrast between Dirt/Turf and Turf/Dirt!
Surely there were other factors in the race, much more complex than this one. But among the other six horses there were no positive trainers stats (with one small exception), and all the other trainer stats had ROIs that were worse than what one would lose by random betting.
On the basis of this one piece of logic, one single trainer stat with only a 31-race sample, I made an action bet on the Robertson horse. The horse won, paying off at nearly 7-1.
There are two issues here. One is the small sample. In order to get a large turf-to-dirt sample for Robertson, I'd have to wait through his lifetime and maybe if his son inherited the trainer job, I might be able to continue the stat, and maybe it would be a play after the grandson continued the stat. Either I would lose the small sample, or discard it.
The other issue is "thin slicing", a term we horseplayers used long before it became a buzz word in a best-selling book. We called it an "angle". Sure, an angle slices thinly through the complexity of the past performances, doesn't it? With the betting public doing a damn good job at collective and comprehensive handicapping, it certainly is difficult to confront the betting public as a standing army: head-on. Thin slicing is more equivalent to guerrilla warfare. We attack only when the standing army is too clumsy and when we are more agile.
By definition, winning in a pari-mutuel situation requires using a different approach from the sophisticated crowd, for the crowd's analysis is overbet and underpaid. Thin slicing, when applied elegantly and with agility, seems to be a good answer. But there are two obstacles.
The first is that we cannot force it. We will lose if we play every single angle. There are too many of them. Had Robertson's stats been positive in all categories, then the value of this one category would have been diminished or neutralized. We have to sense when one angle rises above all the rest. In this Robertson case, it was not only the one simple stat but also the contrast with his other stats.
The second obstacle runs deeper. We have been conditioned to comprehensive handicapping. It is a quasi-religious and cultural conditioning. It is sinful to not handicap in the accepted way. I am trained in the theme of culture, conditioning and the willingness of human beings to change. I write books about the subject. Changing one's ways means demolishing immense psychic barriers within us. It's not easy. To be a successful angle player, we not only have to cross the border out of the country of comprehensive handicapping but we cannot trust everything we see on the other side of the border. We have to be selective.
It won't do us any good to demolish the barriers of conventional handicapping if we dive in and play all angles indiscriminately. The trainer stats relating to this particular Robertson horse, serve as a clear example of one case in which teh angle superseded everything else.
HE WHO LIVES BY THE BUZZ DIES BY THE BUZZ
Three Claiming Crowns ago, in 2004, I picked a $20 winner on the C&X website, by the name of Chisholm. On Thursday I found myself playing against Chisholm. Since his win, he has spiraled to a new bottom. He had not one a single race in 2005 or 2006. In looking back, the reason I was able to put Chisholm on top came from inside information, directly from the trainer.
But when one hangs around the track and gets bombarded by insider information, the end result can be catastrophic. Some trainers and owners "like" their horses in a way that is even more subjective than the way we bettors "like" a horse. In reviewing my Claiming Crown analysis for the past two years, I can safely conclude that the Chisholm win caused me to overestimate the value of inside information.
Two painful examples come to mind. In this year's the Express, I had put the Richard Englander horse Whose Career on top. Englander is a hands-on owner who works directly with his owners, and claims are made with this owner's approval. The highly successful Englander's exhuberance for the horse [we had once done of profile of Englander in C&X] was seductive. But when I saw that the horse's 12-1 morning line had crumbled to 5-1, in large part thanks to Englander's own money and his broadcast enthusiasm for the horse, I realized, too late, that I'd stumbled into a trap. You cannot make money playing horses that should be at least 8-1 or 9-1 for fair odds when they are bet down to 5-1 or 6-1. If the horse had won, I'd have breathed a sigh of relief, knowing it was a pick three inclusion that I should not have depended on.
In the following race, The Emerald, I had put Dr. Detroit on top of my second choice Al's Dearly Bred, the eventual winner. The reason for making this choice was the eloquent assistant trainer's seemingly objective description of Dr. Detroit's physical condition.
But Antonio also told me that Dr. Detroit had a problem with hot weather because he did not sweat. At the moment I typed in my choices for the race, the weather forecast had downgraded the heat warning, it had cooled off outside, and we were expecting a reasonable 90 degrees followed by a cool-off.
But after my picks and posts were in, the weather forecasters went back to their original predictions of plus 95 temperatures. It is difficult for me to backtrack on a selection, for when I do, that horse ends up winning. Dr. Detroit left the gate running with great spirit. But somewhere on the backstretch I could see that there was something uncharacteristicly wrong with him. He was done early.
Inside information can be treacherous because each piece of data must be analyzed in context with the psychology of the purveyor of that data. Some purveyors give off a good sign when they elegantly underestimate the chances of their horse. For others, overexuberance is a telling sign that they are too subjective about the horse they "love".
In the end, what we see on paper can tell us just as much as what we hear from the trainer's or horse's mouth.
THE LAST WORD: AN UNCOMFORTABLE SUBJECT
For years we have been engaged in a drama that depends on many actors. We the players support the system. The industry could not exist without us. We need trainers, riders, grooms, exercise riders, computer experts, and this can go on and on. We tend to forget that there is one primary actor in this drama: the horse.
We also forget or simply don't pay attention to the fact that horses live on past their careers and the ones that do not enter into the breeding picture will either be cared for, left to malign neglect or slaughtered.
Mathematically it is impossible to keep all horses alive until they die a natural death. The seven-year-old claimer you bet on today may be slaughtered tomorrow.
Any time there's an effort to keep one of these magnificent animals alive in a realistic way, we should support this effort.
However, we also have to face the fact that horse slaughter is a necessary reality. We should know that humane methods of horse slaughter exist, and that any man facing execution by electric chair or lethal injection would glad choose to be a horse rather than a man at the moment of death.
While one celebrity horse has become the subject of a media soap opera, thousands of others are forgotten.
Recently, the magazine Horse & Family dedicated extensive coverage to the subject of horse slaughter. We now reprint a letter from that publication. The opinion in this letter does not represent a position of C&X on this issue. C&X only asks that we show respect for the horses we bet on, and appreciate them as living beings.
DEMAND HUMANE HANDLING
by Dale Lamminen
I am glad to see the open-minded approach of Horse & Family on the distasteful subject of horse slaughter. The area around me is becoming a mecca of 5-acre horse farms. It seems to be some kind of status symbol to be able to buy a 5 acre piece of heaven and stock it with riding horses, which are treated more as lawn ornaments than useful beings. Very few if any of the owners do any riding. This situation is not unique to my area; it is happening all over the country. The result is a glut of horses that serve no useful purpose other than represent status and ornamentation. Many of these horses are of non-descript breeding, are spoiled, not well-trained - in short, have little sale appeal.
Along with the need of people to have a horse is their desire to have a "cute little colt". So grade mares are bred to grade stallions (because it's less expensive) and a colt is born. Most people don't have any idea of the work involved in owning and training a colt and when faced with that situation they find it is beyond their ability to handle. Another spoiled, untrained horse joins the herd - a herd that is getting out of control.
Second, many horses are not fit for any useful purpose. They are foundered, have navicular or ringbone, are blind, old or have some other malady that makes them unusable. It is true that they are alive, but their quality of life is poor at best. In most cases they live because there is no cost-effective way to relieve their suffering. In my area it costs about $150 to euthanize a horse and another $150 to have it disposed of ---$300 that most people find excessive, so the poor horses suffers until it dies from neglect or illness.
Third: the glut of unused and unsound horses has a detrimental effect on the financial end of the horse business. The horse market has plummeted in the last few years. People who bought a horse a dozen years ago for $2,000 are shocked that it is only worth $500 on today's market.
It is time to look at the situation with our minds instead of our "bleeding hearts". The horse is a magnificent animal, one that I have had a lifelong pleasure to call my friend. But in order to preserve the overall health of the horse industry it is increasingly necessary to purge the weak and useless animals from the herd. In the wild herds, Mother Nature does that, and she isn't too gentle about it. We must admit that horse slaughter is necessary. That being the case, we should expend our energies to demand that transportation to the slaughterhouses and the slaughter itself be tightly regulated so that they can be done humanely.