Saturday, November 22, 2008

Bizarre Night at the Meadowlands for the BC Elims

I was all set to write a quick synopsis about the Breeders Crown eliminations at the Meadowlands. But then I remembered my golden rule of betting the Meadowlands on weird days - don't read a thing into it.

The wind was whipping and it was cold. Bob Heyden had a touque on that looked about ripe for a Northern Quebec ice fishing trip.

The full writeup at Standardbred Canada is quite good and summarizes things well.

As for comments from this bettor? I think I am just going to save it for next week. This cold that is gripping the northeast deserves a fireplace, the heat up, maybe a snack, but no handicapping.

Hopefully it is a bit nicer tomorrow for the rest of the show.

4 comments:

Alan Mann said...

All in all and on the whole, I didn't think the results were quite that bizarre, especially as the night went on and the favorites won the last four. With the benefit of hindsight, I thought Musical Mystery and All Star Hanover were major overlays, and Captain Sir (final quarter in 25.4!) looks like he's just a late developer

Pull the Pocket said...

The results were not crazy, that's true. But I on nights where we see horses going four seconds slower the the three quarters at the M, and high winds, I often pitch those PP's when handicapping the following week. There are some horses who I am sure it affected that did not show what they can really do.

Wind Gatherer said...

If there is one book that you would recommend for a harness racing novice, just one, what would it be?

All I know is there are horses and they drag around a funny little cart.

Pull the Pocket said...

Not really,

Barry Meadow wrote a comprehensive guide back in the early 1990's. The rest focus on things that are old school and to be quite honest, won't help too much. A beginner book I would recommend is Beat the Overlay by Bill Heller.

Harness racing is a chicken or egg sport. People tell us that there are few harness books because there are few fans to make a market. But perhaps there are too few fans because there are not enough books. We go around in circles and generally circle the drain.

We dont even have a formulator four type software to grind trainer data. We dont have a Jcapper or HSH or HTR. Data is held in a lock box by the industry and we either can not buy it, have no real program to use it, or we can buy it but need to be a programmer to use it. Then we can not promote it because there is a threat of a lawsuit if we do from racing.

In my real job as a consultant I have worked with 200 or 300 companies in many different businesses. I have never seen a more bizarre business than harness racing in my entire adult working life.

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