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. 

Quiroz and Ochoa: Nothing New, Except the Frequency

Unless you've been living under a rock or don't have social media, you know all about the alleged "betting coup" orchestrated by trainers Quiroz and Ochoa, who entered four runners on Sunday, winning three. 

Via Finley's TDN piece, trainer Angel Quiroz says he did nothing wrong. 

Others certainly disagree. 

On paper, to me this reads pretty simple. The trainers had their horses ready, entered their horses, likely bet their horses (or someone did, who probably isn't a professional "coup" bettor or race fixer as he/she bet a daily double with $37 and $10 winners that paid $25; ITP must be losing his mind), and probably walked away with some cash. 

Where have we seen this before? 

If we had a nickel for how many times a horse won off slow works, a buried qualifier, off claim with terrible form, or with a good old-fashioned form reversal, we'd have a whole lot of nickels. 

"Man has horse ready, man bets horse, man makes a few bucks if the horse cooperates". We don't like it, and it's kicked many of us out of nice scores in multis before because we can't handicap it very well, but let's face it: It could be inscribed on Eclipse Award trophies.

Sure, in some of the instances something nefarious was going on. After all, when there was the EPO bust a number of years ago in Kentucky, the trainers who bought the drug probably weren't using it for their burgeoning careers in the Tour De France. Bad things happen in this game. 

But getting a horse ready off dull works and bad form? Hell, that's as American as apple pie. 

As for the "coup", well color me skeptical. We not only have the aforementioned daily double bet - which to me signals we're not dealing with Keyzer Soze - the talk about offshore betting is, well, curious, too 

I actually checked-in on the 4th at Saratoga Sunday, and in the early betting offshore the only live horse was the 8, the Chad Brown piece. Markets moved downwards on Classic Rock during the betting offshore (as Crunk notes), but why wouldn't they? This barn signalled something was up via the FH works (JK even mentioned it on the telecast). That the sharps caught on shouldn't surprise us. 

What I think (other than Dougie Sal's intrepid reporting and reach with the Portnoy RT) turned this whole thing into a mainstream story was the frequency of it. One day? Come on guys, seriously? 

I remember 25 or so years ago there was a trainer who was booted out more times than Bill Laimbeer. He was one dirty dude, but he recruited beards from time to time. One time his new beard had three horses in one card off a barn change. All three ran off the screen; one I think, if memory holds, in a form reversal where the horse was 110-1 the last start. 

A trainer I knew at the time said to me: "They went too far. They were pigs at the trough." The Clouseaus in some alphabet pieced two and two together and this new supertrainer had a short-lived career. 

Honestly, I think if they did this over 24 days instead of 24 hours it'd be a nothingburger. It'd be "the barn's hot, they have these horses ready to run big"; DeRosa would be making the third entry an "A" horse on his "grid". Some sharp on twitter would tout the horse and we'd give him or her their flowers. It likely wouldn't be a story in the TDN. 

Why do I feel that way? Because I think we've seen this movie a thousand times before. On Sunday, I suspect it was just more visible than usual.

Have a nice Tuesday everyone.