How Hard is it Mentally for Bettors to Pitch the Obvious?

I sat down and listened to the Bet With the Best podcast yesterday, which was a (part one) revisit with warm 'n cuddly ITP. 

One area I think it's worth looking at again here on blog has to do with a big, huge, everything of ITP - being able to take a stand against the common funnels in pick n tickets. 

ITP talks about this almost casually, like it's an immutable truth, and if you can't see this strategy as positive, you're from a different horseplayer planet. 

The issue many have, from what I see, is that we are from a different horseplayer planet. Doing what he prescribes and does so easily as a learned heuristic, goes against human nature. 

This isn't the only game where we see this phenomenon. 

In DFS, we'll read the fantasy websites, turn on NFL.com or ESPN or Matt Berry and we'll hear all week how the top-rated running back of the week is Saquon Barkley against the Giants. It's anchored in our minds, and if we don't use him, we feel we're losing something. And losing something so obvious is pain. 

Smart players, as Garett Skiba talks about in DFS and has won million dollar tournaments using, think differently. 

They say there's a chance in a -16.5 chalk game that Hurts gets three TD's with tush pushes and Cooper DeJean returns Gabe Prewitt's buddy DeVito for a pick 6 in the first half. And then Kenneth Gainwell gets the carries in the second half. He pitches, and doesn't care if he loses. 

Kahneman and Tversky won a Noble Prize in 2002 exploring this phenomenon in cognitive bias and behavioral economics; namely, "EV" that everyone talks about is really, really hard to take advantage of, because of the way we're wired.

For example, if people are given the choice to get $400 or a coin flip for $1,000, folks choose the bird in the hand. The bird in the hand is Barkley, the Pletcher firster everyone is talking about on TVG, or the stumbling Sandman in the Rebel. Our mind simply melts if we miss those. We want to avoid this risk because losing is more painful than winning is joy. Self preservation is a reason the human race has been around for 200,000 years. 

ITP's mind, I believe from having success with this strategy for a long time (including just after he taped Chris's pod this week), doesn't melt, it gets excited for it. Skiba's does too. 

There's a lot that goes into making a mind-pivot like this, where it's second nature. You need good bankroll management, a mindset where when the chalk you pitched does beat us, we don't go into regret mode and let if affect our play. We, of course, need the requisite skill to find horses that maximizes our chance to cash outside that one Barkley race. We need to make great tickets. Putting that all together isn't easy. 

But the fact remains. When everyone is funneling a sequence through a set of horses, and we see a different path, we have to at least be open to training our minds to take advantage of it. Accepting that $400 is okay, when a 50% chance at $1,000 is available, is no beuno in a 20% takeout game. 

Have a nice Tuesday everyone. 

Making the Right ADW Choice. The Choice (for many of you) is Right in Front of You

 I flipped on Yonkers last night and saw their promo that they run most nights for their ADW. 

• 8% rewards on all Yonkers wagers
• 10% winning deposit bonus, so if you spend $10 on a bet, get back $100 for $90 profit, they give you another $9. 
• 100% deposit bonus (up to $100). 

No, this isn't CAW stuff, but frankly it's pretty damn good. 

Let's go through it for a second. 

Let's deposit $1,000 at Yonkers, which is $900 plus the $100 bonus. 

Let's pretend we don't know much about handicapping but we have some betting skill. Here's the post index at the Hilltop oval:

Posts outside the top, say, 4 are not great. Posts 1 through 4 beat the average loss by a few points, generally. 

With our $1,000 bank, let's bet every rail horse to win. 100 bets of $10 each. 

We cash around 20 out of 100 bets; these bets are eligible for a 10% bonus. 

Our $1,000 bet returns us 8% back ($80). 

And we got started with a free $100. 

We're pretty much beating the takeout and we haven't done anything but take advantage of a promo and better pricing.  

If this sounds rudimentary it's because it is. 

But it's also what CAW teams do. They do it with scale. 

Why, if you play this track, do you not take advantage of this? It's a potential thousands and thousands of dollars a year for your bankroll. They even have 5% rebates - regardless of volume, yes, even if you bet $25 a day - for many other tracks. 

It's good for Yonkers - they get pool sizes up - and it's good for players - they make more money. 

They aren't the only ones if you shop around. I don't know for sure, but I believe Iron Bets probably offers cash rewards. So does Horseplayerbet.com. There are others. 

I know the CAW debates get people in a tizzy, but they're not going anywhere and the real betting world is what it is. We have to adapt the best we can.

Canadian players with HPI have zero choice in this country, but players who play at the big track ADW's who do not offer rewards do have a choice. What in the world is stopping you from making the financially correct one?

Have a great Thursday everyone. 

Uniform Judging is (Unfortunately) a Pipe Dream

When you see a potential riding or driving infraction that affects the outcome of a race, how many of you are confident in the ruling? Show of hands. None, okay, me neither. 

Brett Sturman wrote an article on HRU this weekend that focused on a few rulings of late (this case in harness racing) where he was completely confused. One of them (about going inside pylons) was bonkers and the other (I was involved in this one, and it cost me a lot of scratch) regarding the breaking rule that defied everything we've been taught to believe. 

Both of the sports we bet seem to be discombobulated with the rules. 

In runner-land things like herding are let go (at times, sometimes not) where the outside horse loses momentum and loses the race by a foot. It kind of depends on which track the infraction (or non-infraction) occurs. All I know is when I see the inside jock yank the horses head right to make contact or stall the outside runner (and I bet the outside runner) I start having some very bad feelings. Again, at some tracks the feelings are more frightening than a Wes Craven movie, at others I am only mildly terrified. 

In harness-land, things can be, like Brett wrote, like living in Blair Witch, where your next door neighbor is Regan from the Exorcist. Depending on the track, things can be called almost the polar opposite. 

At the Meadowlands it's not uncommon to see a horse pitched who alters a horse who is nowhere near the action involved, simply because a driver gets antsy and changes his path. At Mohawk, things are called much more in-tune with the Thoroughbreds (mostly) where it needs to affect the finish. 

I think we bettors do not expect to agree with every decision. Much of it is subjective. But is it too much to ask for the sport to take it seriously? 

As Brett alludes, on the ruling at Batavia Downs, the real judges were out of town, and were replaced by out of state judges who judge at a country fair circuit. No, I'm actually not kidding. How is this possible in a sport with billions shoved into the windows?

Flip on twitter and you'll hear a lot of gripes about the sport. Some can surely be invalid or sour grapes. But can we blame anyone for being negative when a billion dollar sport treats these decisions involving a ton of money with such carelessness?

I was asked to help with this issue years ago in Canada, and we did bang out some uniform rules. It didn't work as planned but I can say, at least in this country, we see better than most. In the U.S. with all the jurisdictions it was a different story and I think it's a complete mess. 

Whatever the case, the problems seem so systemic that confidence can't help but wane when we talk about a sport professionally running its judges booth. It's a pipe dream, and as long as it is, we'll continue to gripe about it, almost on a daily basis. In my view, it's not a bug anymore, it's a feature. When we open a form or program, it's simply a part of our world. 

Have a great Monday everyone.