Mark Cramer
C & X Report

CX 2009 Issue 2

CONTENTS
Editorial: Has the day arrived?
The Number One Line Making Flaw
Tournament Play: Inteview with Mike Schalewski
Ed Bain on Automatics
The Best Bet in Racing and How I Lost it
The Music Man: Tribute to Howard Sartin
Dueling Book Reviews: Bukowski and Williams
Dr. Z returns
Don’t Buy this Book!

EDITORIAL: HAS THE DAY ARRIVED?
Part One
As we are learning from the performance of the financial markets, no variable is permanent.
In our own financial market, I have been writing, ever since 1990, that the trainer factor is dominant. But I am also aware that no factor is eternal.
My hypothesis is that, with increasing availability and use of trainer statistics, the trainer factor may finally begin declining in value. Back in 1990, for example, the DRF did not publish those cute little trainer roi specialty stats beneath the past performances. In 1990, Howard Sartin (see tribute in this issue) was still proclaiming that “the trainer cannot talk to the horse” and Beyer had not yet embraced the “super-trainer” factor.
I asked Ed Bain, one of the pioneers in trainer research, what he feels about my hypothesis. Ed was adamant that trainer stats are still “the way”. He still plays his trainer stats but in his soon-to-appear new past performances, which highlight trainers stats, he has accepted that speed and fractional times, in comparison with pars, is useful information.
If Ed gets his way and his new pps become successful (the prototypes look stunning), perhaps that will be the last straw in the overuse of the trainer factor. Ed believes that the traditional handicapping factors are so engrained in the horseplayer consciousness that his edge as a trainer expert will remain. If his pps do come out, they could be an artistic success as long as they do not occupy a major share of the market.
Race betting is a financial market so we should always be trying to anticipate trends of the future, and I have asked myself which factors could be dominant in the upcoming decade.
One potential factor is class. The class factor is still scorned, or if not, underestimated by most handicapping experts. As you know, the class factor is one half of our Short Form method. The other half is trainer. It seems that we could actually test the two of these factors up against each other by looking at non-Short-Form qualifiers that win races and tallying whether they had won in spite of being proven losers at the level (class factor) or in spite of their trainer showing less than a 12% hit rate (the trainer factor).
In other words, which of these two factors is more likely to break down in races where our SF qualifying horse loses not a non-qualifier?
Let’s follow up on anticipating the new dominant factor for the second decade of the century.
Part Two
What is the difference between the apparent expansion of the race betting industry (internet betting, more simulcast facilities, etc.) and the overexpansion of the financial markets through sub-primes, derivatives of the sub-primes, and then derivatives of the derivatives?
From the beginning it seemed inane that so many new betting outlets could emerge in a market in which the number of new players was shrinking and so many old players (the un-smart ones) were defecting to the slot rooms.
This seems to me like a type of super-derivative: cutting up the same market of regular players and recycling it into newer exotics and more elaborate from-home betting programs. Just how much more can the race-betting industry squeeze out from the same diminishing player base…before undergoing a major contraction?
In the derivatives game, the major players, with nothing more to invest in, recycled their own investments among themselves, until they became worthless. Now, the non-playing public has to foot the bill.
There is, however, a big difference. Racing is not a virtual economy. It is a real industry and the best part of it, the track itself, is labor intensive, producing a tangible spectacle and providing jobs.
If racing collapses from its own attempts to expand income without expanding a customer and player base, then so be it. I have always marveled at the lack of imagination for bringing new players into the game. It is a game, and one in which a majority will always lose. The attraction is that you lose less at an exciting afternoon at the track than you would lose going to Disneyland or a Broadway show.
I feel that there is something wrong with the level of our culture that people can prefer mindless entertainment over a great participative game like in-person horse betting.
mc

THE NUMBER ONE LINE-MAKING FLAW
Recently one of our readers has been good enough to pick out problem races for me. In this way I am forced to confront handicapping issues that I would normally bypass. In this exercise I have been making odds lines and then analyzing how I’ve done.
Already on several occasions I have had the winner on top but with my line odds above the eventual track odds. On bright side, this line making strategy has allowed me to pass races. On the dark side, I often price myself out of betting the favorite.
Let’s look at one of these “mistakes” and discover universal lessons in handicapping.
Fair Grounds: 13 February, Race l
My eventual pick was the 8 horse, Onesockmissing. If I recall correctly I had him at 3-2. Even with the late scratch he could not have come down to less than even money. He went off at 4/5 and won.
Now I am not ready to get on a soapbox and proclaim that we should be playing 4/5 horses. But I can say that if we underestimate the chances of our most-likely winner, we could end up wasting a bet on a second or third choice. I’ve discussed this with C&X readers.
Parenthetically, it seems (no empirical data to prove) that our best methods are less successful in races where there is a heavily bet favorite, and only on rare occasions should be bet against an odds-on horse.
Let’s look at the horses in the above race, using the Short Form. We have two factors: (1) eliminate proven losers at today’s level (two losses or more since last win); (2) exclude trainers with less than a 12% hit rate. We also have what I have called “quality eliminations” which means that (a) the horse can be eliminated on both of the above criteria; (b) the horse is a long-term chronic loser at the level; (3) the trainer has less than 10% wins or both trainer and rider have low win percentages.
1. Action Now: lost twice at today’s level (Clm 7500n2L). However the losses came prior to a 6-month layoff and immediately following that layoff. This is a 5yo that has only won a single race in 10 tries, so it’s not likely, but gets a question mark. (Trainer has a 16% win rate.) Not eliminated but only a maybe contender.
2. Gayle’s Fan is a quality elimination with three losses at the level, all by more than 10 lengths and a 2% trainer.
3. Stormin Skip is a quality elimination with three losses at the level and the combo of 8% trainer and 6% rider. However, you can’t eliminate from back holes of exacta and trifecta because he finished his last race only a length and a quarter behind today’s favorite.
4. Expedocious is another quality elimination since he has just won a maiden claimer. Winners of maiden claiming races have a horrendous win percentage in their next race back. Also has a 6% trainer.
5. Talentino has never lost at today’s level but is coming back after a 3 _ month layoff and his trainer is 0 for 8 with this move. By the letter of the law, this horse remains as a contender, having a 16% trainer but with an 0-for-4 record this year.
6. Forty Ninth Case. This horse only lost one race within our elimination categories but this was at Clm5000n2L, so it’s one level BELOW today’s. The trainer has a 9% win record. This one is tilting toward quality elimination.
7. SCRATCHED
8. Onesockmissing. Lost only once at this level, finishing a close second and has the highest level maiden claiming win of this whole field with the possible exception of one horse. Trainer is Steve Asmussen, a 20% trainer with 24% dirt wins. Not only that, Onesockmissing made two moves (early and late) in his last race. Add another plus: he’s going from a 5% rider to a 19% rider.
So let’s look at the dynamics of this odds line. We have only one horse that definitely qualifies by the Short Form method. We have three and probably four quality eliminations. And we have two maybe horses that by the spirit of the law could be either retained or eliminated depending on which piece of information we choose to use.
Now if indeed this is a single-contender race, then according to my own criteria, he should be 1-2 in my line. When I first did this line, I had a second contender that was eventually scratched.
Balancing the point dynamics of the odds line, the three (or four) quality eliminations could compensate for the two “maybes” that are probably non-contenders. One of those maybes, Action Now, actually prevented me from lowering the odds for Onesockmissing, but that was because I had not weighted the significance of so many other quality eliminations.
If Onesockmissing were indeed an only contender, and with so many quality eliminations in the race, he should have been 1 to 2 in my line, which would make him a bet at 4/5.
It’s not really in my culture to play 4/5 horses but I can play an 8/5 or 2-1 and the same line-making flaw has excluded me from playing such logical favorites because I have tended to underestimate my most likely winners. You can see with this race how this flaw (underestimating my most-likely winner) actually manifests itself.
In conclusion, the greater the presence of quality eliminations, the lower we must make the odds for our most likely winner.
My most-likely winner in this case paid $3.60 while the maybe horse, Action Now, finished third at 5-1. Surprising for the place was Stormin Skip … not really a surprise since he had lost to Onesockmissing the last time by only a length and a fourth. The exacta paid 16.60 and the tri was 55.20.
Ho hum. But we need to look back at such races in order to correct the flaws of our own line-making.

TOURNAMENT PLAY: Interview with Mike Schalewski
(Editor’s note: I thank Jeff Maday of Canterbury Park for identifying Mike Schalewski as a successful tournament player. Jeff organizes tournaments, so his word is better than what one hears in the grapevine. Mike’s home track is Canterbury Park. If you gave me a choice of any place in the world to be on a Friday night in the summer, I would choose a lively and festive Canterbury, where the management still uses imagination to attract customers.mc)

Mark: Can a successful daily player do poorly in tournaments, and can an
underachieving daily player improve with tournament play? What are the
two or three biggest differences between the two?
Mike: This is only a personal observation, so here we go. The hardest object to overcome for daily players that try to cross over into tournament play is that it is such a humbling game.
Most successful players don't concentrate their energy on W/P play. If they do so, it's for a saver purpose. They find their niche in the game and grow on the success in that area.
So, if they try to incorporate their style into a tournament format it may not be a good fit.
Many successful tournament players go 0/10 or 0/15, many a day, but this is part of the strategy of being competitive. I feel that good players find this hard to take and don't take the time to figure it out. You can't get good results unless you have a mixture of minimum odds in mandatory races to cap horses and only low odds in the final stages for maintaining a lead or moving up a position or two.
Some players feel they can pick enough short prices and they'll be there at the end. That is a very rare occasion.
I personally felt I came into tournament play because I was an underachiever at the game at most levels. Maybe it's too many plays, too high a take out (only matters if you cash), or just too hard to beat the game with my own money. I just find the game more exciting, competing among fellow players. Our pick six is the NHC or the HPWS championship.

Mark: Are there any idiosyncrasies in the way you prepare for a tournament?

Mike: I travel with a friend to most of my tour play. I find this works the best for me. He's a great handicapper and having two opinions can't hurt. He's an analyzer and I look for the story horse in tournament play. I feed off of his advice. So if he is entered, I'm in, that is first and foremost.
Next, I like to come prepared. I don't what to miss a mandatory race; it may cost you at the end. I map out my play on a single custom score sheet, with times, tracks, selections and other info. You don't want to miss a race, in some tournaments you can be disqualified for doing so.
In the past, I thought you could never over research and handicap in preparation of an event. But, I have done well picking up a racing form that day as I have with ten hour prep work days.
In the end, if you have done this long enough, you are probably just handicapping your own past experience of what works and what fails.
I would like to say get some good rest, but it only comes later after the tournament.

Mark: You've been successful before in tournaments. What have you done right
and what have you done wrong?

Mike: It usually comes down to could a, would a, should a. But in most cases, you have to get yourself in position with a horse, at a price, at some point. In a one-day tournament, you'll have to believe the price horse is the game maker and you build off of him. With two-day tournaments you have greater chance to play 3-4 cap shots, and again, work off of them.
This has worked best for my style in W/P competition. As for live money events, I try to keep it simple and build a bankroll and push on your best bet of the day. Use show parlays, W/P bets, but keep it simple. I feel you can get there without the exotic wager.
The problem I have is closing the deal. What usually separates the men from boys is making the right decision during the final race or races. I have a lot of growing up to do.

Mark: My own bottom line in tournament play is above a 100% roi, but I am
("was" because I'm burned out from the excruciating intensity) often forced to play defensively simply because as a spot player I have great difficulty finding 5 bets a day, when many tournaments require 10. How do you balance offensive and defensive, or do you just throw the long pass every time?

Mike: If you do not make the offensive play, the defense will never get off the bench.
Stay with a game plan for the given day and just realize how difficult a task you are trying to accomplish. Going back seven years at a South Dakota event with only 50 players in the tournament (including all the NHC winners to that date, plus many NHC qualifiers), I will not forget this experience. I landed on HAW 30/1 shot and 3 or 4 players jumped up and rooted him home. I finished in 16th place that day, and a lesson well learned. If you don't achieve 1 _ to 2x you starting bankroll or 2 to 3 xs in a money event, you are in same place as the player in last place. I would like to think if feel I have a greater chance to reach the top by coming from behind, than trying to have the lead and hold on. But again, both places are better than none.

Mark: Tell our readers how you got involved in horse betting and a little
about your evolution as a player.

Mike: During my U S service days in the early 70's, I was fortunate to me meet another serviceman who introduced me to the game.
From my first visit to Ak Sar Ben race track to other tracks like Arlington Park, Belmont, Cahokia Downs, and a handful of others, I was hooked. I moved to Bossier City in 1979 just to be near a live race track LA Downs, since no OTB or simulcast existed. And then all great books on the game came out in the 80's and 90's.
In the early 2000's the game changed for me with the conception of NHC. It took a few years to qualify but it was worth the time and effort. You meet great fellow players, visit different tracks and compete against the best, in tournament play. I would not trade this game for season tickets to any sport game, catch the biggest fish and shoot the largest trophy animal. It just gets in our blood.

Mark: What follows is Mike’s blow-by-blow description of key moments in a recent tournament. Perhaps this will allow a newcomer to tournament play to get a feel for it.

Mike:
Recap of the NHC # 10 from Jan 23 and Jan 24 2009

I'm going to talk about my friends and myself, since it turned out a great experience for all.
Player M S (myself)

Day One
Landed 13/1 early, no cap horse, ended with $75.

Day Two
1st play 30/1-3rd
2nd play 25/1 2nd
3rd play 30/1 3rd
Managed to build 2nd day score to $84 and total two day score of $159, good for estimated 20th place going into the last race, a mandatory for all players.

Player DA (best bud)

Day One
Landed same 13/1 early, no cap horse, ended day with $60.
Late in day one, he passed on a 28/1 (his own system play) which finished 1st as a cap horse.
When back to room, watched TV and did not look at a form until midday of day two.
Managed to make a big run with 18/1, 11/1, 15/1 and managed to have several optional plays left near the end, from very little play at the beginning. He managed to go into the last race with $135 for day two. Two-day total at $197.00

Play G S (Chicago Bud)

Day One
Landed same 13/1 early, played great and was at $89 after day one.

Day Two
As I see it, the play of the tournament: He played a Mike Matz 1st time starter, stats at 0/44 1st timers, but a great trainer as we all know. Knowing few would play such a horse was a winning move in my eyes, for sure. He stayed in 2nd place for most of the day and dropped to 5th place going into the last race the mandatory for all, about $11 from the leader at about $214.00

Well, the final play.
No horse would vault me into the lead, so I wanted a horse to move me into the top ten.

G S and DA played for the win and neither one knew each other’s pick.

We all landed on the same 13/1 shot. He ran out, but gave all three of us our first opportunity of winning and doing very well at the big dance.
As you probably read in the NHC reports that the 11th place player Joe Conte and several others behind him picked the 22/1 shot to leapfrog over the other contestants.

The final results for the above players
GS finished 7th for $16K
DA finished 9th for $10k
MS finished 44th for $0

By no means am I bragging on myself or my friends. Just showing the way three players approached the tournament and were able to reach the final race with the chance to win big. I personally feel that I was not as prepared for the final races in the tournament and that I never came up with the cap horse in the two days of play, and that reality I could not overcome.
All the 300 tournament players have a similar situation to look back on, and we are hoping for a better outcome next trip.

Mark thanks for the interview and listening to another player’s view on the game and tournament play.
Mike Schalewski

AUTOMATICS
by Ed Bain

I place bets automatically. That means I bet with a method and my method of Automatics are statistics on trainer moves who produce 8 or more wins plus a 40% win rate or higher and a positive ROI (Return On Investment).
Horse racing has been about betting on the speed of the horse. If you really want to learn and make a living betting on the horse, you must turn your attention to the trainer and through statistics bet on the horse through a trainer stat. If you only bet speed you will settle too often on the favorite.
How I came to bet the horses automatically is through record keeping. In 1991 I started tracking Trainers returning a horse from a Layoff of 45 days or longer and for 4 consecutive races. I have the same 4 step process for trainers who claim horses. Once that work was complete I then separated all trainers who produced at least 4 wins plus a 30% win rate. I labeled this betting stat “the 4+30”. I then ran a win rate on that stat and overall the 4+30 has a 22% win rate. This told me the 4+30 is a volatile stat because of the small number of wins what I was seeking was a more reliable stat to bet a statistic that would make me bet as a self acting devise based on the trainer’s consistency along with a positive return on investment (R.O.I.). For an automatic, I now settle on trainers who have produced at least 8 wins along with a 40% win rate and a positive ROI. This stat has produced a 29% win rate. With statistics you start out up here and you end up down there. By only betting this stat with a positive ROI, I could bet and know that over any amount of time I would make money because the stats that were “8+40” produced more money than I bet.
In the U.S. and Canada there are just under10,000 trainers. From my Automatics stats there are 631 Trainers who qualify as an automatic bet, but only within certain specialties they have. All my Automatics are track specific and all produce a positive ROI.
Many trainers qualify in multiple categories as an example. For example, at Santa Anita there are 22 automatic trainer stats. Seven trainers comprise those 22 automatics. Some of the Automatics are more refined from the overall stat.
Consider Ted West, one of my favorite claiming trainers from Southern California. At Santa Anita, West shows 42 Claim-1 sprints (a sprint is 7 furlongs or less) and he won with 18 for a 42% win rate. 25 of his claim-1 sprints were on the dirt. 12 won for a 48% win rate. That is the advantage of a statistic. It’s win rate percentage. The percentage itself manages my “expectation” because the ROI makes money if I were to bet all the Automatics.

Betting Automatics has also made me adjust my playing. Automatics supplied me with order and a place to start. Automatics made me set up a routine to find them and then bet on them. I looked for the same trainer stats over and over. Within a short time self-control or discipline took over my betting, and most players know that self-control is a major requirement for success. So, by having a super-structured format of information outside of my “self”, my inner self is able to conform to the discipline.
I have only wanted to bet the Automatic stat because it has a big win rate and a positive ROI. The reason I developed the Automatic bet was the comfort of betting on a known percentage and projected ROI, and to make a living betting on the horses.

(Editor’s note: Ed Bain’s newsletter will be unveiling a whole new vision in past performances. The fundamental data relates to trainer data, establishing a color-coded hierarchy or ranking of the significance of each factor, with the top reserved for automatic bets. He also includes a streamlined and minimalistic view of horses speed as it relates to par, in an easy-to-use format. His automatics, which have been explained in this article, will be color coded for easy reference. Those interested in learning more about Bain’s work can find it from a link on my own website. Go to www.altiplanopublications.com and to the left you will see a link to the Bain newsletter info.)

THE BEST BET IN RACING AND HOW I LOST IT
Horses have their past performances and we humans have our own. Sometimes our own past performances get mixed up with a horse. I allowed this to happen and got burned.
When I first saw the past performances of the 2009 Santa Anita Handicap, the Big Cap, I noticed that the horses that were being touted were all second-rate competitors, among them three-year olds, that had only recently found a new lease on life by competing in an impoverished setting that allowed them to seem better than they were. I viewed this as a case of last year’s 3yo has-beens going slumming for better results.
They were touting Court Vision, who came up way short as a Triple Crown pretender last year, and in the similar frame of reference were Monba and Cowboy Cal. Court Vision had proven that he’s a grass specialist only. Colonel John seemed to represent a colony of SoCal horses that can compete favorably only against their own.
So I looked elsewhere and came up with two horses shipping in that outclassed the field. And here is what I consider the best bet in racing. Find a Grade 1 stakes race in which the competitors are simply not legit grade-1 horses and then find the horse or horses that really deserve to win a Grade 1.
There is nothing new about this idea. You can see in James Quinn’s classic book, The Hanicapper’s Condition Book, perhaps the best handicapping volume ever written. You could see it also in my reasoning for successfully picking the longshot Spirit One (Arlington Million) for our Stakes Weekend. (We will be having some Stakes Weekends soon, and I thank you for your patience in waiting for the occasions to arise.)
So I found two legit Grade 1 horses in the Big Cap: Zambezi Sun, winner of the Grand Prix de Paris and then Einstein, who once finished second to none other than Curlin, on the dirt.
My bad decision here can be traced back to my history with Zambezi Sun. I had gotten to know that horse very well, playing him two years ago in the Arc de Triomphe (where he was knocked off stride while apparently making a move in the stretch).
I had passed twice on ZS, thinking he was a hanger, and watching him win on each occasion. I began to re-watch some of his races and he seemed to me like a bleeder. He also seemed to do better on firmer surfaces. Both of those traits would have given him a new lease on life in the USA, where he could take Lasix and race on firm ground.
At the time I remember telling myself, “If I were the owner, I would ship him to America.”
That is precisely what happened, and my previous experiences with ZS made me feel, in a way, like an accomplice in the decision to ship the horse. When he came up with two bullet workouts on the SA pro-ride surface, I said to myself, this horse is headed to the Big Cap, and don’t play him in his turf prep. So I recommended to friends to pass on ZS in his turf prep, even if he looked to outclass the field. He lost at 4/5 and I felt like saying, “I told you so”.
Gomez had chosen ZS over the other Frankel horse Champs Elysées, and that added an extra perk to my feeling about this horse.
My experience with Einstein was less substantial (subjective) but Einstein’s experience was not less substantial (objective) than that of ZS. I had respected the horse, and took note when he was second to Curlin on the dirt, since he was not supposed to be a dirt horse. I had bet against Einstein in the Arlington Million. I was so thrilled to collect on Spirit One that I did not bother to look at the trip of Einstein. (You can see it on Youtube even today.)
Einstein bobbled at the start and was left uncharacteristically behind the field in the early going. Couple with that is the fact that he also had to confront the slow fractions of the leaders, so you could see that Einstein was up against it. He made an energetic move on the turn, but he had to do it three wide, and then four wide at the end of the turn. He still did the stretch with earnestness but he had little left, as could be expected.
Both Zambezi Sun and Einstein had class credentials that put them above the rest in the Big Cap. Under normal circumstances, I should have made a line for the race, but my considerable experience with ZS in comparison with my lack of direct visceral, subjective horseplayer pps with Einstein, caused me to become fixated on one horse and too hard-headed to still make an odds line.
One of our C&X readers had been communicating with me about this race and he asked me why I had not made a line. I had told him that “the only other class horse in the race was Einstein”. So pure subjectivity was tilting me towards one horse and away from the other, and I cannot remember with what stupid words I responded that a line in this case was not possible.
Using the criteria for the Grade 1 class factor in a Grade 1 race, one could have made ZS at 2-1 and Einstein at 3-1. (The rest of the field was not authentic Grade 1 material.) Both of my contenders would have been overlays (ZS at 8-1 on the board and Einstein at 5-1).
There is absolutely nothing wrong with playing two horses to win in a single race, provided those two are both overlays. Handicappers are willing to play 16 combinations in an exotic bet but somehow think that win betting should be pure.
Einstein won, paying off at 5-1. ZS proved that neither new firmer surroundings nor the lasix were the antidotes to his hanging ways. (For years now, my losing pick in a Grade I stakes race has come back to win the next time out, without my money on him. It is true that you cannot time the market. ZS may win next time, but not with my money.)
The moral of the story is that we have a major task to separate within our handicapping consciousness what is objective information from our “subjective past performances” with any particular horse, and that making an odds line forces us to come to terms with our own subjectiveness.

THE MUSIC MAN: TRIBUTE TO HOWARD SARTIN
You’ve all heard by now that Howard Sartin has died. He passed away in the company of his family, at home, on January 31. He must have been in his 80s. Not much has been written since his death about a man who changed so much for so many.
Back in the early 1980s when I was the racing editor of Gambling Times, an article arrived at my desk from a person with a strange name: Howard Sartin. Once I got through the first paragraph, I knew I was dealing with an iconoclast. He said he was a doctor of psychology, though some of his enemies dispute that claim. He wrote that “absence makes the heart grow fonder” so if you want to cure a problem gambler, you have a better chance to teach him to win than to get him to stop. Sartin had actually practiced his “win therapy” with problem horseplayers, and was relatively successful if you compare his therapy roi to that of the typical shrink.
(We have some shrink readers. You tell me if I’m right or not.)
You see what I mean. I was hooked. Next he wrote about calculating pace handicapping on the basis of feet per second and then dividing races into segments. Once you compared the segments (or fractional times in feet per second) you could visualize if the horse was an early runner (E), a pressure (P) or (S) a sustained pace horse (what we would call a closer). You could call this a gimmick if you like, but in fact, the visual aspect of his printouts helped a player to dig into a race.
Howard explained that there’s no such thing as a closer. A horse that looks like he’s closing in the stretch is really just slowing down less than the others.
Howard developed computer programs to craft these ideas into a methodology. He paid tribute to the nearly anonymous handicapping here, Huey Mahl, who wrote the tiny classicThe Race is Pace (Gamblers Book Club, Las Vegas). It was Huey who first spoke of how horses expend energy. I met him once in Las Vegas and he looked like one of the crowd, dressing no better than Albert Einstein. I mentioned Quinn’s book as the greatest ever, and Mahl’s slim volume comes in a close second in my humble opinion.
So, thirsting for something original for the challenged pages of Gambling Times, I felt rewarded by Sartin’s article and published it. According to Sartin, the publishing of this article helped to jump-start his Sartin Methodology Group, but knowing the charming Howard, I suspect he was merely flattering me, knowing that I had become one of his adversaries. So this is why I relate Howard to the Music Man, because he seemed to me like a classy hustler, a PT Barnum, and I like that type of person. What would the world be without such characters?
A group of players coalesced around Howard Sartin and when you talked to any of them, you heard they were winners. All of them! They were told to do 20 race samples and then report on their results. They mainly played claiming races on the basis of the pace factor, observing the track profile of each race track in order to know whether it favored E horses, P horses or S horses.
I went to one of his events and felt humiliated. There was a thick atmosphere of inflated ego in the room: everyone was hitting high percentages of winners, and amongst them, I felt as if I couldn’t pick my own nose. It was a regular hotel conference room but I felt as if I were in a huge tent and this was a revivalist meeting.
I dared to mention the trainer factor, and Howard smiled paternalistically, reminding me in front of his followers that “the trainer can’t talk to the horse”. I would go regularly to the SoCal tracks and whenever I bumped into a Sartin follower, he would remind me: “the trainer can’t talk to the horse”. Of course I know that a trainer cannot talk to a horse, in spite of what Robert Redford might suggest.
Among the Sartin followers there were some very talented people. One of them was Tom Brohamer. Tom’s brother once played for the Chicago Cubs. Tom never repeated to me that “the trainer can’t talk to the horse”. I had the opportunity to actually watch Tom play and concluded that he was an authentic winner: the real thing. Then he wrote Modern Pace Handicapping, and the book is still good today.
My writing went in a different direction. I wrote my first novel, called Please Hold All Tickets, in which my main character had to confront the Certinites, a sect or cult of handicappers led by Prof Certin.
After the book had reached the publisher and was being printed, I had second thoughts. Had I been unfair to Doc Sartin? I honestly believed that his methodology was good, but not surely good enough to make ALL of his followers winners. I felt that there was fudging going on, with his followers consciously or unconsciously feeling that they needed to please The Doc.
Sartin read my novel and then, in his publication called The Follow-Up, edited by Dick Schmidt, wrote a glowing review. It took me by surprise because I had been leaning towards thinking that Howard was a control freak, like Fidel Castro, a paternalist who wanted the best for his people but who couldn’t deal with anyone else as big as him and who felt that his system was the only good one.
As some of Fidel’s best people were dropping out or being purged, thus it was with a number of Sartin’s followers. The parting was not friendly, though probably not as bad as my divorce with (I mean “against”) my first wife. There was bitterness in the air and one of Sartin’s people, a magician, played an ugly prank on him.
Sartin’s empire seemed to be crumbling. I have more tolerance for control freaks. Sartin was one of those rare human beings who was truly unique, and as an iconoclast, it was understandable that he would be the center of controversy. Then Barry Meadow, never a Sartin follower, wrote an article that essentially called Howard a fraud.
My take is that Sartin had a good product and so whatever bizarre marketing techniques he would use could not be raised as evidence against his pace handicapping product.
My dear friend Dick Mitchell was another who parted with Howard, but Dick’s fine All In One program was surely influenced by Howard’s stuff.
Later, I visited Tom Ainslie (Dick Carter) in Ossining. Dick Carter, for me, was one of the greatest all-time human beings, and we owe it to him and his books that horse race handicapping has legitimacy today.
I discovered that Dick Carter was using an updated Sartin program and finding it an excellent tool. Carter told me that his handicapping had become reinvigorated with Sartin’s methodology.
So now that Howard has died, how do we look back on his life? Was he the paranoid that his former followers allege? I don’t care. For me, he was a truly creative human being who produced something unique. Howard could play jazz on the piano, and you could see in his inventive way of living, that the jazz was there in everything.
Charlie Mingus had trouble dealing with people, as did Miles Davis. They’re still great.
A number of the players who parted with Howard Sartin did so only after they had learned to win at the track.
On days when I am having an enjoyable chat with friends or family, I think back and long for something perhaps more challenging, and maybe “troubling” in a good way: another polemical discussion with Howard Sartin.
I will miss him.

DUELING BOOK REVIEWS:
The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors have Taken Over the Ship by Charles Bukowski and The Diamond Bikini by Charles Williams.
Like many of Bukowski’s books, with this one it is difficult to separate fiction and autobiography, and in particular, Bukowski was responding to the call from his editors to write a diary of a particular period in his life. During this diary, much of the time is spent going to the races.
Some of the writing here seems weary and bland (compared to Bukowski himself), but just when you think that the man is washed up, he comes up with some beautiful prose. Consider these words from the diary insert of February 21, 1993:
“Went to the track today in the rain and watched 7 consensus favorites win out of 9. There is no way I can make it when this occurs. I watched the hours get slugged in the head and looked at the people studying their tout sheets, newspapers and Racing Forms. Many of them left early, taking the escalators down and out. (Gunshots outside now as I write this, life back to normal.)”
Or:
“Why are there so few interesting people? Out of the millions, why aren’t there a few. Must we continue to live with this drab and ponderous species? Seems their only act is Violence. They are so good at that. They truly blossom. Shit flowers, stinking up our chance. Problem is, I must continue to interact with them.”
Bukowski conveys a genre of race-track réalité, suggesting, without saying it, that the automatic bet will work better than comprehensive handicapping, referring to a trio of players sitting in front of him in the grandstand:
“I have sat behind them for two weeks now. And none of them has yet picked a winner. And they bet short odds too, I mean between 2 to 1 and 7 or 8 to 1. That’s maybe 45 races times 3 selections. That’s 135 selections without a winner. This is a truly amazing statistic. Think of it. Say if each one of them just picked a number like 1 or 2 or 3 and stayed with it they would automatically pick a winner. But by jumping around they somehow managed, using all their brain power and know-how, to keep on missing.”
How cynical can you get? Well Bukowski is even less cynical than Charles Williams. One of the four main characters in The Diamond Necklace is Pop, a tout who takes his young son Billy from race meet to race meet, as his assistant. The story is told through the eyes of the naïve son. With this technique, we learn through Billy’s matter-of-fact observations what he himself doesn’t understand. For example, they print up a sheet after the sixth race. We are left to understand that Pop is post-printing his “winning” picks for the early races and giving the sheet out for free, so that people leaving the track will buy his sheet the next day.
Billy learns geography by the names of race tracks. So for him, he is in Aqueduct and not New York. He describes the streets of Aqueduct, where a social worker tells Pop that if Billy has not learned to read, the State will have to take him away and put him in a better home.
Billy claims he CAN read, and he proves it by reading a racing form. The social worker tests him with Robert Louis Stevenson. Billy is alarmed. Why so many words? He considers Stevenson a bad writer. He shows the social worker a racing form, explaining that the style of the form is much easier to understand, with shorter words, such as “clmg”, “wk”, “6f”, etc. From Billy we learn that Stevenson’s style is wasteful with words and letters.
The action shifts away from the race tracks to Louisiana but it becomes even more hilarious with the conniving scamster Uncle Sagamore and the owner of the diamond bikini. To Billy she is Miss Harrington but to us, she is a go-go dancer hiding from hitmen.
Williams combines the Southern humor of the great Erskine Caldwell with the hard edged “noir” of Raymond Chandler for this 1956 underground classic.
You won’t learn anything about handicapping from these two books but you will have a good time and in the end, these are documents of our racing culture.
The Bukowski book is published by Ecco (2002) with entertaining illustrations by Robert Crumb and the Williams novel originally appeared in 1956. Like other American writers, both Williams and Bukowski have their followers in France, and I actually learned about The Diamond Bikini from a French public handicapper.

HANDBOOK OF SPORTS AND LOTTERY MARKETS
Professors Donald B. Hausch and William T. Ziemba provide us with a new collection that also includes some of their original work. Co-published by Elsevier and North-Holland in Amsterdam, this volume is distributed in the USA. The list of contributors is impressive, an international array of university scholars from the USA, Asia and Europe.
Typical of Ziemba-Hausch, we learn about the favorite-longshot bias. Updated stats show us that “favorites have a lower expected value than in the past”, a trend we at C&X have sensed for quite some time.
We learn that if you played all 100-1 shots, you would only get back 13 cents on the dollar.
On the other hand, if you played all horses at 3/10 odds or less, you would come out with a profit.
We also learn, at least from some of the research in this book, is that one reason for the favorite-longshot bias is the fact that informed bettors play better horses while uninformed players take stabs on longshots. This is why huge longshots are greater underlays than heavy favorites.
What we don’t learn is that even with the favorite-longshot bias, in order to win at the races, we need to find precisely those high odds horses in the minority of situations when they are not underlays.
Many of the essayists are concerned with defining the “nature of the risk attitude that is embedded in the odds”. There is some complex balance between risk loving and risk aversion. This is the fascinating part of the researchers’ quest, and is a theme that runs through articles dealing with various types of gambling. Sports bettors will enjoy a broad array of material, and remember, the authors are professors of economics, mathematics and business.
Once you get into the meatiest arguments, the language barrier often intrudes. In the risk-loving / risk-aversion discussion, we run into a reference to the great work of Kahneman. I couldn’t wait to find out what Kahneman said, but this is what I encountered:
“As exposed in Kahnemen et al. (1982), departures from expected utility involve more heuristics and biases than the static discrepancy between psychological probabilities and objective probabilities that can be captured by a non-linear preference function.”
Correct me if I am wrong but what this means is that you cannot pick out simplistic reasons for understanding why players bet the way they do because there exist complex layers of feeling and information that interact with the player and between segments of the betting public. Within a single handicapping head you can discover the drama of an unbalanced and altering confrontation between love for risk and risk aversion.
It is difficult to write a fair review of this book without the necessary mathematical tools. Somewhere buried in my Hewlett-Packard are the symbols needed to just reprint the complex mathematical formulae. Those who love both complex math and gambling should not miss this book.
Luckily, those of us who never got past high school trigonometry still can get the conclusions in reasonably accessible prose. For example, regarding Betfair and betting exchanges, English business professors Michael A. Smith and Leighton Vaughan Williams contradict the position of established gambling operators.
The establishment says that “person-to-person wagering on internet betting exchanges represents unfair competition” against tracks and legal bookmakers. On the contrary, the authors of this article conclude that “Exchanges contribute to reducing the information barrier; they increase the incentive to process and act on race relevant information by reducing transaction costs and increasing bet flexibility.”
Legal bookmakers argue that in the exchanges players can be exposed to insider abuse. The authors counter that adequate policing of the exchanges would solve the problem and preserve the pro-consumer gains that come with the betting exchanges.

DON’T BUY THIS BOOK!
We come to a fork in the road and we face a choice and we know in advance that there are arguments in favor and against either path.
When I have to make a choice, peace of mind is usually the primary variable. With the handicapping research that eventually found its way into Tropical Downs, I first rejected the option of a hard-core package and a high price. I did not want to exploit my faithful readers by selling a dream.
In fact, in the short introduction I let the hard-core handicappers among my readers know that this might not be the book for them, since it is essentially an adventure story with handicapping research woven in.
The next choice came with the title. I fell in love with the title The Ultimate Exotic because a major theme of the story was the relationship between what it takes to beat a pick 6 and what it takes to commit the perfect crime. After discussion with my editor and publisher, we decided that even though The Ultimate Exotic made poetic sense, the potential reader might be unfairly deluded into thinking that this book was the formula for a six-figure winning bet.
Even during the early drafts, I had a chance to “recall” the book. I feared that for non-racing people in search of a good story there might be too many racing scenes and at the same time, for racing people, there might not be enough racing scenes. I gave the second draft to several readers, pointing out my dilemma. I made sure these were the best of horseplayer friends, meaning those who are not afraid to tell me the truth. They gave me the go-ahead.
Readers were involved in other stages as well. One reader had written me a good letter saying that the missing ingredient from Scared Money was a chase scene, so I obliged him by including one in Tropical Downs, but in my own way, with a car chasing a bicycle through Los Angeles.
Another reader had mentioned to me that, though he enjoyed Scared Money, he lamented that it was a series of connected stories rather than a full-fledged novel. That stuck in my mind so I resolved to a novel in the classical sense.
In the end, I enjoyed the challenge: how to incorporate handicapping research within a novel of adventure and crime.
We human beings are supposed to act primarily with the idea of passing on our heritage to later generations of our family, in the form of genes or culture. But as a horseplayer, my intrinsic purpose on earth is to pass on my racing culture. Until now, I have failed, with none of my four children becoming avid handicappers.
But with Tropical Downs I was given one more chance: my granddaughter, who insisted on reading the novel. This led to a family controversy. My wife and daughter told her that she could skip over the racing research sections. But she has insisted on reading them.
A deeper controversy was whether or not to allow her to read the call-girl scenes. My daughter and her husband argued against. But my good wife (the grandmother) argued for.
Relating the act of sex to a 5-furlong sprint or a mile-and-a-half marathon, or a two-and-a-half mile steeplechase with 23 hurdles did not seem at all pornographic to me, but perhaps the younger generation is returning to Puritanism.
For me it would be a tragedy if the new generations cannot grasp the all-consuming thrill of a great horse race. I hope that Tropical Downs can play a role, humble as it may be, in introducing good people to a great pastime.