Snap Trends are a Horseplayer's Bread and Butter, Other Betting, Pffft

Half my timeline went bonkers today. The GOP took over the lead, according to Reuters, in the generic congressional ballot polling. This is pretty shocking (although the trend has been better for them) because the D lead in such polling has been in the teens, at times, over the last six months. And everyone knows the party in power loses seats to a pretty stout degree in mid-terms.

With the medium term trends, and this tightening, we'd expect a big change in the wagering, correct? Well, no. The market didn't even move.

We see this often in political betting, or long-term sports betting, and it is a wonderful, perfectly rational anchor in an irrational topsy-turvy twitter world.

Political bettors know the trends matter, but cohort changes that drive polls and polling in general are rarely trends, and are most-often noise. This is not even counting the concept of discounting, where an Access Hollywood tape means little when the person on the tape is saying exactly what you think he'd say.

Conversely, as horseplayers, we are opposite creatures. Short term trends or silly polls aren't there to be discounted, they're there to be acted upon.

That track bias you noticed in the first two, buttressed by your data and smarts regarding wind, or drying out Tapeta? Get off your ass and bet it, because it could mean a five figure day. If you're wrong, you'll lose a couple of races. So what, we're used to doing that.

When Woodbine trainer Richard Moreau was setting the world on fire in January and February of this year, winning at well over 30% with everything, you were probably firing.

One day he got cold, and well, he's never cold. So you, as a horseplayer, not a political bettor, paid attention and started fading everything.

He went 3 for his next 66. It might've made your month.

If you're a horseplayer, your bread and butter is betting trends; trends that happen in almost real time. There aren't a whole lot of betting games where that works. We should embrace it.