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. 

Are NYRA and CDI Slaying the Golden Goose of Horse Racing Relevancy?

As most of you have heard by now, the execs at Churchill Downs Inc and NYRA have created a new racing series that excludes the much-maligned second jewel of the Triple Crown, the Preakness Stakes.  

Leaving aside (as Dougie points out beautifully in his YouTube video)  races like the Haskell could be in peril as well, my opinion is pretty devoid on nuance. Take away the noise of the Pennsylvania Derby perhaps being mothballed, or the fact that the Mid-Atlantic Match Series never worked; to me this is potentially much bigger than that. 

Horse racing in its present form is not what it was in 1926, or even 1996. Its current zeitgeist is not based on attendance, handle, what Mike Repole thinks of it, or any other assorted business metrics. It solely, in my view, is based on what the governments allow or disallow. 

Whether it be harness racing in Kentucky, or "new" Belmont racetracks in New York, the bind that holds the sport together is the politician. As sad as it is for me to opine, they, not you, are the sports' most important customer. 

How does one keep the sport relevant in the eyes of those who hold so much power over it? I think one way is to ensure the sport is top of mind in statehouses everywhere. 

The easiest way to achieve that goal is to preserve and steward the sports' biggest events. The one's everyone watches, the Americana, the one the TV networks pay to show, not the other way around. They're the luxury boxes politicians bring their spouses to, the fancy drinks and the infield and the gladhanding. 

And what this sport currently has that brings it all together for them, in inarguable fact, is the golden goose of The Triple Crown. 

The Triple Crown is the foundation, in my view, of everything. 

And, again in my opinion, when you mess with it, you mess with the entire foundation of this sport.  

The Kentucky Derby isn't going away and the politicians can have their day, just like we all do. NYRA can promote the Jim Dandy, not as a prep race, but something that's on television, and hope a handful of the 100,000 or so tuning in on Fox are employed in Albany. Maybe I am being overly dramatic. 

But I can't help think of the old biblical metaphor about feet of clay. When your foundation is built on a corporate, ready-made out of the box "series" that can potentially replace the thing this sport has always had to hold it all together with the strength of reinforced steel, things can get wobbly in a hurry.

Let's hope that doesn't happen. But the fact that they've entertained putting horse racing's one and only true spectacle in harm's way makes me fear for the future of this sport. 

Have a nice Tuesday everyone.