Monday's (Tiny) Super Spectacular Blog

Hello everyone. I have not wrote a Super Spectacular Blog © in a long while, and well, this isn't one of them either. But since it's been quite some time, I figure I'd jot down some random things that filled my head. 

The Biz Loves the Hard to Hit Bets

The $1 Big M pick 8 debuted on Friday with around $5,000 in the pool. The bet is seeded with $50,000, so technically, if you are the only winner early on, it's big EV. This is not dissimilar to the one at Scioto a couple of years ago that I and many of you chased from time to time. Regardless, a $1 pick 8 in the Big M races which can be amazingly curious and non-formful in spots, we could see some big pools sooner or later. 

Unpaid Plug

Chris's Bet with the Best book will be available soon. You can keep track of it, and other things, by checking out his website. 

Corporates Everywhere

I missed last night's halftime show with Big Bunny (Gabe Prewitt you're making me mistype this) simply because a guy I never heard of, singing songs I have never heard, in a language I don't understand, seemed negative EV. Plus, I did have some halftime betting to do. 

But, as many have pointed out, it's the way of the corporate world right now, especially in sports, and the NFL is probably the best at it. Namely, growing the game in all parts of the world, or with demos you don't have, is black type for the Wharton grads. We see it with Alix with an i at Gulfstream in our small way. 

I notice the NFL-MBA suits are pushing Germany bigly the last couple of years. If the overlords decide that next year's halftime show is Germany-icon David Hasselhoff singing the hits, it could be hard to pass up. 

It's Early, or is it?

Early Derby top ten lists are generally the worst. The best colts probably have not started yet, and recency bias prevails. Every prep race it seems is the next big thing.

This year, David Aragona popped Nearly into the number one slot, and I wonder, is this season perhaps different? This colt was dominant and seems he can go forever. 

Barn Raids

Rumors usually abound regarding the powers-that-be raiding barns and this past week it was no different. I heard from a couple of folks that they happened. 

I guess these "visits" have to be done in secret, and we're never going to know the details for sure. But they do piss me off. As one of the barns - rumored to be visited - got cold this week, what's real and what's memorex? When will the barn get uncold? If a barn gets cold isn't that an admission of guilt. 

So many questions, so few answers. And as usual, bettors are the last to know. 

Just Say No to Narratives

Trent Dilfer, Jake Delhomme, Rex Grossman, Nick Foles, Colin Kaepernick, Jimmy G and Sam Darnold. It could be a law firm, or could be a "middling to bad quarterbacks who never made it" trivia answer. But of course, each of them either brought their teams to, or won a Super Bowl. 

Embrace of Betting but Only if I say So

One of my favorite videos to watch from time to time, especially for the old footage, is Adam Sandler's (what I think was hilarious) The Lonesome Kicker. The NFL clearly licensed this video, but equally hilarious was their editing. 

"I didn't realize if I shanked one and blew the point spread some drunk guys would throw me into their hibachi after the game" was changed to "I didn't realize if I shanked one because my toe hurt".

 

 Now, of course, we can't turn on the tee vee for the NFL ten seconds without being inundated with gambling chatter. Point spreads were alive and well when Sandler made this video, and they're alive and well now. Nothing has changed, but everything has changed at the same time. Sometimes it feels like we're living in a simulation.

Have a very nice Monday everyone. 

Racing's "Vanishing" Attendance

Bucky shared an interesting graphic today on the twitter - 

This isn't a shock and awe for you and those who follow the sport, but it is interesting to me nonetheless. 

Back in the 1960's, with the emergence of television, Pete Rozelle and the NFL were worried. If people could watch football at home, who would be left to go to the games? That clearly didn't happen. NFL games are, and were an event; Americana if you will. 

In 2025, stadiums are packed with people buying $400 tickets and $12 beer. They're camping out, tailgating, and in Buffalo at least, jumping off stuff to break tables. 

Racing on the other hand, as the graphic shows, has not had such luxury. 

This is primarily, in my view, because it was never a sport in the first place. We aren't tailgating before the third at Aqueduct; we aren't looking for tickets on stubhub for the feature at Mountaineer. Other than a Triple Crown race or a trip to Saratoga, we just aren't doing it. 

We're watching on television, on phones or on a computer .... and we're betting on the same devices. 

In my opinion, the sport has spent a ton of money and thinking and sweat equity on trying to drive people from home to the racetrack. We've paid money to Alix with an "i" Earle and many others my demographic have never seems to have heard of. We have a Youtube dude that owns a piece of Sandman. We had an ABR Bus. We've had kids in suits and hats getting smashed on Grey Goose (hey, it's today's sponsor). 

The sweat equity, cold hard cash and machinery thinking we've exhausted on trying to get people to watch the sport is truly mind-boggling. But, again in my view, it was misguided because unlike NFL football, the reason people packed the stands wasn't to watch the sport. 

No, 37,754 people showed up in 1946 on Met Mile day to bet the sport, not watch it. And the millions who poured into Roosevelt and Yonkers over the next fifty years on cold and rainy Tuesday evenings were there for the same thing. 

The sport of horse racing's attendance never "vanished". It was never real in the first place. The only thing real was the gambling.

When we lost that, as we have the last twenty or so years - I think, in part at least, by spending too much time on buses and suits and influencers and marketing, and neglecting the betting game itself - it's an enormous task to turn around. 

Have a good Wednesday everyone.

Equibase Rating Systems, Dumbed-Down Telecasts? This is a Complex Game, We Should Start Acting Like it

Equibase, to its credit, announced a new rating system for Thoroughbreds last week. This dovetails, somewhat, the rating system in Europe, as well as the Trackmaster rating system in harness racing. 

The reviews are plentiful and mostly not overly complimentary. 

The problem with this rating system, or ratings in general in horse racing, is that the game is really, really hard. 

Pinnacle Sports, which has been around forever with hundreds of billions of betting handle, dipped their toe into offering fixed odds awhile back. It might've been the quickest run to the exits in the history of bet offerings. They couldn't make it work. 

Odds lines, power ratings, how fast is horse A versus horse B with limited sample size is always a problem (especially with lower class stock). The game is difficult, even for the very best. 

Dumbing down such a complex game into a number is achievable, yes, but in most cases you aren't going to end up with an optimal number. 

We as humans like to dumb down just about everything because the human condition wants to live with heuristics or a few simple rules.  It makes us feel better. 

We see a lot of it in horse racing telecasts with rudimentary analysis ("this horse is dropping in class, this horse has a driver or rider change"), easy math ("tough race, hit the all button"), or dumb bets like Racing Roulette (I barely remember what that was, but I remember it wasn't good). 

It's been written here and elsewhere - where people are probably smarter and use better grammar - so I guess it's no use to go over how dumbing down the complex is like sticking a spoke in the wheel of a ten speed. Nor is it any use explaining why a hard game is an edge not a liability. If you read this blog you probably agree already. 

But I guess it could be worth touching on what a successful ecosystem in a complex game should be.

The answer to this question in a twitter thread is, I think fundamentally correct.

In summary, your skill game being hard is an asset and the difficulty of the game provides a breadth - the super sharps, the casual sharps, and the entertainment types. Where your game is sustained is how these three groups are handled. The super sharps can not have so much of an edge that they kill everyone else off. The sharp casuals need to be able to navigate the game in a sharp way, and grind their bankrolls, trying to get better. And finally, the fish can't be led to slaughter - they need to stick around and roll over their banks.

Horse racing clearly doesn't do this well. The CAW's have such a huge edge they're feeding on everyone. The sharps can't complete near as well. And the super casuals, for crying out loud - we're asking them to bet television pick 5 tickets and hitting the all button. 

I believe we need to embrace the toughness of the game, and build the game around it. Equibase ratings are hard. The game itself is hard. If we make this our default, the way we educate new players, adjudicate customer cohorts, run and present the game, sets a foundation that at the very least allows for the game to be responsive to its complex needs.

Have a great weekend everyone.