Data in the Horse Industry Has Always Been About Who Matters

Datagate in this sport has eaten up the headlines of late. There's a lot of chatter and a lot of reference so there's little use of me going through it here. Crunk's summary of late, showing the, ahem, misinformation, has been as usual pretty solid. 

No matter how we feel about it, in my view, this is the way it always has been. 

I opened up the interweb today, and came across "PFF Pro". This is a stats and API package for the NFL season and it includes: 

• Proprietary statistics and 50+ new data points their DB people came up with
• A new interface where metrics are built into the "PPs". IOW, you can build custom PP's with ease. 
• Player pages, not unlike historical horse PP's, incorporating whole sets of new data
• Game views to handicap games, i.e. why did a team win. 
• An API, so all this data can be placed directly into any program you want. 
• A new AI tool, where you can ask the database a question, and it spits out an answer. In our sport this would be like typing in, well, pretty much anything you could think of about a horse in its current situation, and you'd get information back. 

The price? $24.95 a month. 

Meanwhile back at the ranch, we saw plenty of screen shots of "custom PP's" over the last month for one or two (or five or ten, who knows) people, but no one else. 

I looked into some harness data recently, and found out harness is not part of the Equibase plan, where one can get free data for testing purposes. Leaving aside I would not know what to do to make a CSV file actionable is not the point; the point being, even if I did know how, I'd be out some serious money. 

Now, most of us who do business understand some of this. 

Subscription based services or SAAS work on scale. The cost to create something is sunk, then over a certain point, each additional customer's marginal cost approaches zero. Things get built for a large market. 

Horse racing in 2026, as we all know, is not growing and the market for these products (unlike PFF's offering today) is small. Sinking money into something like this is usually a pretty bad business decision. 

But I think it's more than that. In racing's case, much more than that. 

Sinking money into ROI negative or loss leaders in horse racing is common. Everytime we see a purse of $25k and handle of $10k on the race it's happening and it's been going on forever. 

HISA itself probably proves the point. It's above my pay grade to analyze their systems and net worth per dollar of funding, but this place has a huge budget and from what we read, the whole vet database could be accessed by changing a horse ID number in a URL. Is this a professional enterprise?

The point is, this industry sinks a lot of money into a lot of things without worrying about if $1 going in is $1.01 coming back. 

It's never a KPI for them, it appears, unless when it comes to growing a customer base. 

When I sit here and debate questions about why a CAW can get data I don't have; why a team with millions in bank can get pricing I can't; why someone can access a database of vet work like they live in Hong Kong where everyone can see it and we can't. And yes, why a company like Pro Football Focus can create something so user-friendly and useful for $24.95 a month for everyone, I believe the answer to the questions are easier than I think. 

It's not about money - the sport has plenty of it from slot machines, and hell, HISA gets a reported $75M a year alone. It's not about people who don't care about us - many people in this sport clearly care and want to grow retail handle and the fan base. 

In my view, it's been, from day one, about who they deem matters. 

Distributing slot money to purses matters. Keeping the slot cash rolling by focusing on the politicians matters. Giving 5% win takeout and millisecond execution to a conglomerate in Australia that bets $500M a year matters.

Me and you who might want to ask a question to a database to get better at the game, or those of us who don't bet $500 million a year who want lower prices of our own? 

We don't matter today because it happens to be today. 

No. We don't matter because we never have. 

Have a nice Thursday everyone. 

PP/HISA-Gate: Will Knowing Vet Work Help Me Win?

This summer has been quite a time for horse racing. 

It appears the Triple Crown may in fact be dead which sent shockwaves through the industry (for about fifteen minutes). Now we're off and running to a new shiny object - the HISA portal scandal. 

There's no need for me to rehash things, so I'd point to a couple of resources if you wanted to get up to speed. First, DeRosa had a twitter spaces yesterday you can listen to on replay, and Robin Howlett dove deep into the tech yesterday, as well. 

I'm not going to dissertate too hard here - I can often only focus on one shiny object at a time - but I would like to take a look at the vet work and PP's component of all this. 

For probably a decade now on this blog I have harped on this topic in a number of ways. 

I believe more data that's open to the masses is welcome. I also believe, in the case of vet work, having it documented, published, and exposed to the masses is also helpful for bettors, our equine athletes and for participants. Level playing fields are good things. 

Vet work has sucked up a whole lot of slot money, and the horse trading side of the game - built some would say on hoodwink (unloading a "bag of bones" surreptitiously) - is not one of its positives as an investment vehicle. In addition, doing vet work on top of vet work - which is what the HISA portal aims to nobley quell - is no bueno. Wanting to make our model more Hong Kong and less Presque Isle Downs is an honorable goal. 

Having said that, I'd like to hyperfocus on this purely from a handicapping perspective. What benefit would we have from these custom PP's with vet work added to the running lines?

We Probably Know Already

Recently I got a note from someone who altered me that a harness horse had work done a few weeks earlier. I scanned the PP's and saw a little time between starts, and I watched a qualifier where the horse looked better and sounder than it had. The horse ended up 4-5 and won. 

Did that information help me? Probably not, because I could reasonably conclude the horse got work done because of the training pattern. 

This happens all the time, and we as handicappers are, in my view, a lot smarter than we think. 

Before the Preakness we read that Napoleon Solo had bad feet and they had been working on them. We had the poor line in the Big A race, the break, and the wicked workout showing the horse clearly was on his game. Did we need a line in a custom PP saying "blocked feet" a month earlier to tell us anything we didn't know?

We don't need a "custom PP" or to hack a database to know two plus two equals four. 

What the HISA Database Shows is Incomplete Anyway

What I love about Hong Kong racing is when a horse form reverses or throws a clunker, they report exactly what the findings were. 

Did a horse flips its palate, did they have a high white count, did it experience afib or the thumps, did the horse tie up? 

As I understand it, the HISA database would not show any of the treatments for any of those things. 

And what about bloods? Right this minute thousands of horses are getting bloods done. How can we document this information (impossible), but even if we could, if a horse has a low HGT, are we all liver function experts? 

1st Time Vet Work or 2nd Time Vet Work?

We have our sneaky custom PP's and saw some vet work. We've got our $200 win bet ready. The horse is ready, right? He runs 8th. 

When a horse gets vet work done, he or she is sore somewhere. And soreness means their routines are off, whether it be jogging three miles on Wednesday for a harness horse, or heading out each morning as a Thoroughbred. Without a work or a schooler or qualifier, we know absolutely nothing. 

I believe - again - when we follow simple logic we should know when a horse should be good or bad with some degree of certainty. 

What's This all Mean?

Ed and I think Mike Adams made a good point - like all data, perhaps it can be good in large samples to use in a model, but in small ones it can crush bankrolls. If you're a CAW, I definitely think it can be worth something, and if only they have it, it can raise takeout marginally on the rest of us. 

Near the end of the twitter spaces, one speaker noted he had heard that Marshall's betting ROI the last few months has been poor. Ups and downs are nothing new; you should see my dreadful ROI the last month. But it's like we should be surprised, because he had this data that no one else had. 

I'm not at all surprised. 

In fact, for me personally, if I had this data I think it would mess with my selection process and make me less confident at times (for some of the reasons I mention above).  I know myself, and I know how I wager.

As the kids say on the interweb, YMMV. 

This doesn't excuse this scandal, and I have not gamed-out what this data would do for me as a claiming owner. Nor do I have a crystal ball on what should or should not be done moving forward. 

But in my one slice of the world - trying to beat this game in the style I have - I truly feel having access to vet work would likely be of very little benefit to me at all. Don't get me wrong - I like more data. But most times I think it would just layer more data on top of what I already know, and as a player, that's not time well spent. 

Have a great Wednesday everyone. 

Handicapping with the Anecdotal (Hint - the CAW's Don't Do it)

I saw one of those "trending stories" things this morning on twitter, about a mattress firm. We've all seen these stores in strip malls. 

What fuels the conspiracy theories (and my favorite comment - "Who owns these stores, Walter White?") is the anecdotal. Namely, I don't know anyone who ever bought a mattress there, therefore something must be up.  According to the firm's financials, the stores do fine, and with high margins, only need to sell a handful of mattresses a week to be profitable. 

We do this very often in horse racing. 

A rider we don't like is replaced by a one of our favorite riders and the horse wins. The reaction, because of this visibility bias, is that this angle will work every single time. However, as Crunk often points out on twitter, over a large sample, the move is often lateral.

Last night I heard an angle that I've heard over the years at (rainy) Mohawk about driver James MacDonald: "He hates driving on off tracks and is ineffective on them".  

I decided I'd check that angle over the last few years, and:

UDRS on off tracks: 0.339

UDRS overall: 0.338

If we're really diving in, his ROI does decrease a little on bad tracks, but it could be noise or sample size. Call me in three years when we have enough. 

For a generation we heard blinkers on was a great angle, because it kind of makes sense as the horse will be sent, right? And again, for years when we examined global samples, blinkers on actually underperformed blinkers off as a betting angle.

I told a story on Chris's pod that back in the day I bought a book at the Gambler's Book Shop in Vegas titled (something like) "20 Foolproof Horse Racing Angles". Not long after, I had a sizeable database and tested them the best I could (some were not totally testable). Not only were the '20 foolproof angles' not close to profitable, some of them weren't even angles that had a positive impact value. 

The CAW's and other players have, over the years, exploited many of the anecdotal angles we've all used and heard. They generally don't deal with the one, they deal with the many. 

You and I are not CAW's, and most of us think Python is a snake not a programming language, so we'll never be able to verify every single angle or thought we hear from horsepeople, public handicappers, or our buddies at the OTB. But if we want to beat the game, I believe we have to "trust but verify" as much as we possibly can; at the very least, in the words of Barry Meadow, be a "Skeptical Handicapper".

In the end, sometimes mattress stores are in business simply because they sell mattresses. 

Have a great Monday everyone.