This post, it’s the “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” of “First Posts”. It’s the live version of “Freebird” by the band remembered as Leonard Skinner. It’s like what they call the Tantric Sex, paid out slowly and discursively, with much meaningful eye-contact and delayed gratification; however, unlike the Tantric Sex, this one may have no payoff to speak of. None! This is our attempt to make one post speak with more character than 50,000 posts from elsewhere combined. Let’s begin…
Free ones: Rundown…
Frantic City 1, 2, 3, 6
Belmont 5, 8, 10
Calder 3, 9, 10, 12
BFHollyPark 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10
Day 2 of touting from V6 loaded with 2013 pars.
Pay-side: Today…
Churchill 3, 6, 8, 11
Tampa 2, 6, 7
Pimlico 3, 7, 9, 10
Hawthorne 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
Woodbine 4, 6, 10
Lone Star 3, 4, 8, 10
To repeat: Day 2 of touting from V6 loaded with 2013 parsz.
Today’s Stakes Pageantry: Thirty-four added-money events for your Saturday. Have you checked ’em all out?
In the time it took you to turn to the first of them, alphabetically, Race 4 at Belmont, the Tweedside, V6 was already finished doing the numbers and output for all 34. Something to think about. (By the way, for posterity, for the Tweedside, it’s #6 Alyadorable gaining vaunted Triple Threat Horsey status.)
So, yes, that now gives us plenty (plenty!) of time to discuss some of them here, and in such a way that is — at least to us — rational and orderly and consistent. The approach is steady. There is no worry of what factors to emphasize, whether to worry about lone-speed or a bunch of closers or a class-edge or a hot trainer or any of that. It’s relaxing. Calm. Like a Calgon bath, except there’s no beautiful, naked woman sitting in the tub. Not this week, anyway.
Truly, how can you possibly keep it in your head to run down 34 stakes races and figure out what to look and then once you’ve figured that out to then have to do the math and the comparisons and the plottin’ an’ analyzin’ to come up with, well, what exactly? The winner, some contenders? A false favourite? An unplayable race?
How do you do it? This is not a rhetorical question like they are fond of posing (literally, with a good deal of upper-body gestures, too!) in those TED Talxsz. This is a serious question. How do you get all the approaches and plans of attack lined up for your 34 stakes races today, Saturday, then apply those approaches and execute those plans of attack and make sure it’s all the way you expect it to turn out? That would be fascinating stuff to see how the great handicappers of the world would do these 34 stakes races for your Saturday.
Now, we here are not so lucky. We are the dreamers, the impractical, the luftmentschen, the soft-skilled artistes and English literature majors of the world and other assorted liberal artsz freaksz who nonetheless enjoy a nice, stimulating, maybe therapeutic, once in a while profitable day at the hippodrome. For those of us who fit this mold — hey, it’s OK to admit it — those of us who don’t have a supercomputer for a brain, IBM’s Watson for a brain, who won’t be able to whip open the Everyday Racing Gazette and do absolutely flawless handicapping in our heads from just the past performances, an adjunct like the V6 can prove helpful, if not sanity-preserving.
It’s not that romantic to say this, but when you handicap, how much do you really know? Who is to say which factors will be the right factors to choose in analyzing the Tweedside here? Then when we move on after the Tweedside, to the Westchester later on in the Belmont card, will those factors we decided were important for the Tweedside be equally applicable to the Westchester? And so on down the line, to the end of the series, 32 stakes races later. (“But it’s stakes races all the way down!” Wait. What happened to the turtlesz?)
Therein lies the problem with most modern handicapping schemes: we assume too much control over everything in the process, from deciding which factors to emphasize to how best to express, qualitatively or quantitatively, those factors. And that’s not even yet to consider the biggest and most flawed assumption of all: that every last actor (as in each horsey, each jockey, each trainer, each stall in the starting gate, each speck of dirt or blade of grass on the course) and agent (as in one who carries out the agency of the race itself) on the racetrack will conform to the control being exerted from space beneath the size 7¼ hat size in our skulls. Real Svengali stuff! Who knew that to be a great handicapper you had to have skills in telekinesis, too! They didn’t cover that in Recreational Pace Strategies or Speed Makes the Steed.
But there are people who exist who can do this. If you are one of them, continued success. We envy you. For the rest of us supremely ungifted horse-race analysts, a workable approach other than Type-A micromanagement control-freak manipulation would be to devise a reasonably sound and consistent set of the analyses applied unfailingly to all the races, all the time, all the same, followed closely by seeing, rather quickly, too, what sort of probability array comes forth. This is a fancy sort of Sartinez Methodism way of saying: competitive race or not? one solid selection or two? or all the horseys have some kind of reasonable, measurable chance? Let’s begin there. Let’s first determine the shape of the race, and not the speed shape or the pace shape or the class shape of the race, either. Rather, let’s make a modest beginning and figure out who can win. We don’t have to pick the winner or a most likely winner; all we must do is see who can win.
Of course we will not always get this modest beginning completely right. But we should be able to get it right enough of the time such that when we’re not right it would be better to just let it go than to try to learn some kind of lesson from it. (That’s another thing that we find interesting: expecting a handicapping lesson from each race you get wrong. Hmmmmm. To believe you can learn a lesson from a race you lost, is by logical extension to believe also that the lesson you just learned will absolutely apply unfailingly to the next race you handicap having those same general features. Really? Yet they pay lots of money, a lot of money, to people who can talk glibly and plausibly after the races on TVRTV and HGN; minimum requirements are straight, white teeth, and the rest is negotiable.)
All right, all right. So where were we? Oh, yeah, seeing who can win, determining which horseys have a chance. We don’t have to get to ground-level precision to make these determinations; ther’s no need to settle on pace over speed, or form over class, or whatever. We just need a high-level view of who the real contention is.
Once we have that, we can start naming horseys. If the race isn’t contentious, we’re probably better off staying toward the top of the ratings; in the theme-park free-for-all that is the contentious race, however, everything is in play, like the balls in a lotto hopper or the slots on a roulette wheel.
That’s the gist of it. It sounds primitive, but it allows for the dabbling, dilettante handicapper to be able to pursue other interests in life, such as practicing mindfulness, attaining physical fitness, reading good books, listening to worthwhile podcasts and lectures, stumbling through the salsa and merengue, coaxing (bribing?) a one-eyed Pug dog through a hula-hoop, that sort of thing. And writing (writing!). Yeah, that and watching Jeopardy! Monday-through-Friday, check your local listings for time and channel.
But, while we are here to address your concerns, we would probably consider speed to be the best predictor. Yup. Dumb old speed. Final-time speed. Not very exciting, no Factor X, no Vector Percentage Middle, no Mandlebrot Deceleratory-Tendency Ratingsz, no Hypersensitive-Friction-Coefficents Per NanoSecond. Nope. But there it is: final-time speed. Early speed is OK, pace is OK, but they’re problematic in that they are so capricious and subject to noise and randomness. For instance, when we were hand-checking and handcrafting the parsz, the range of first-call variance was ridiculous. It’s embarrassingly theoretical to try to predict the running time of the first two furlongs of a race. Damn hard. Difficult. Guessing. Even though Quirin encouraged us to find the leader at the first call to get a wild profit, how come it&rsuqo;s not been done methodologically or consistently in the subsequent literature? How come? That should answer that question.
And it makes sense. Like they used to say about class in a racehorse, a claimer is a Ford and a stakes horse is a Cadillac (mind you, this was in the 1970s when there weren’t too many reliable foreign luxury marques around!). You step on the gas on the Ford and on the Cadillac and the Ford will keep up for a bit, but then the Cadillac starts speeding away eventually. So it is for early-speed and pace schemes: yes, maiden-claimers (especially in turf-routes!) will run as fast as Graded animals for your first four furlongs — routinely! But by the time they hit the wire, it’s 15 or 18 lengths the other way, at least. Which side of that equation will it be more beneficial for you to be on?
So, to answer your burning questions: speed is the key. Beyer was not wrong in emphasizing it. Looking back, it seems a little disappointing and uncharacteristically cowardly that he turned-tail and softened his anti-pace position in his second book, The Winning Horseplayer. As a predictor, it, final-time, has no equal. Final-time handicapping is where the real qualities of the horseys just stand out so clearly. Now, the famous Icelandic rock group the Sugarcubes did a song called “Speed Is the Key”. It’s manic. Bjork is literally hooting her way through this Icelandic alt-rock romp. “Speed Is the Key” by The Sugarcubes, check it out on iTunes or some such. Who knew that handicapping was so big in Reykjavik?!
Hold your emails, hold your nasty emails, kindly. Early speed and pace have their moments, in isolation, if you can get to that level of precision where you think one horsey has the goods through the first four furlongs; however, in our scheme of touting, we never want to get too close to the handicapping itself. It’s a Nate Silverstein-type thing: yes, the election is decided precinct-by-precinct, block-by-block in a sliver of Ohio; however, aggregations of the analyses are sufficient to make the call — no need to canvass each household individually. No need, Johnnie, no need. Not unless you like to make a show of yourself and of your expertise, so-called.
V6, then, LifeLiner, especially. That LifeLiner Speed Column. The one to the right of the Early Column and to the right of the Pace Column, in combination with the shape of the Betting Line, a Decent Way to Play the Races While Maintaining a Semblance of Variety & Humanity In Your Otherwise Monomaniacal Existence. Many facets of V6 have been stolen and pirated through the years, but they have not got to LifeLiner yet. May they always remain thwarted! Try it — the method, not the pirating. Try it. You never know. There is theory and there is the observed; what you hear in the streets is theory, what you read from sketchy sources is theory, and, indeed, it may in fact turn out that, yes, the theory becomes the observed; but until you have done the observing yourself, with all your own faculties and senses, all you have is the theory. Will the theory keep you warm at night, darling? Will it?
Your Honour, by submission of this screed, we should like to establish our bona fides. Thank you. Best wishesz. Now we resume the touting.
BFHollyPark 3, 5, 8, 9 & 10 are on the free page.
Haw 6 & 8 on the pay-side. So is Pim 10.
The Grade III Derby Trial is CD 10, and it is an open affair. The top two morning-line horseys make sense, as does #9 Titletown Five. Not much clarity.
On the surface, GG 6, the Grade III S.F. Mile, looks contentious; however, #1 Tigah somehow sneaks in to snatch vauned Triple Threat Horsey status in it. Wow.
Down the 101 (U.S. 101) and over to the 405 (I-405) — Californians willfully neglect the highway-type, U.S. Highway or Interstate— when speaking of the local roads. So down U.S. 101 and over to I-405 to Inglewood for Triple Threat Horsey status to #5 Derby Gold (!) in the sixth, the Grey Memo.
(An aside, Race 4 today at BFHollyPark is named for Melair. She was a racehorse and a half. Even though we only saw her through a vintage Motorola television with a scratchy speaker hanging from the rafters at Frantic City via simulcast, nothing could obscure her brilliance. She beat the boys in that race we saw, the Golden Sun beginning to set on the screen even though it was dark outside near the Jersey Shore. If recollection is correct, maybe even it was one of those extended-chute 1-turn Hollywood Park races back in the day. She took away the breath positively.)
More Triple Threat Horseys now, this one in Race 2 at Turf Paradise. #1 Les Claypool (bassist, Primus, right?) can upset as the third-choice on the morning line.
Really good opportunity in EvD 10, the John Henry, if it stays on the grass: #4 Redhotrush and #5 Hit the Road Lee can outrun their forecast long odds, perhaps together.
Good enough is #4 American Sugar in PrM 8, the Goldfinch.
Yesterday’s Activity: Blasted-out yesterday on this here Web log was news that selections, touts and other assorted recommendations made herein were being based on the new, pristine 2013 Cynthia Publishing Company par times.
Always a good feeling, getting the latest numbers. A practical improvement for the V6 in that we cleaned up the extraneous numbers, nearly 5,000 records for which there is no longer use, mainly involving bygone tracks like BM, Pnl, Yav, that sort of thing. So the computations V6 goes through are feeling a little zippier, a little more responsive. Of course, this is probably just a hopeful perception. These computers nowadays are rocketships; unless you have buzzer-reflexes (also known as lockout-device-reflexes and signaling-button-reflexes), you probably won’t feel anything different.
As for the numbers themselves, they are the result of another scanning of the 50,000-odd races that took place on the continent in 2013. And behind those are nearly half a million records amassed over the years to help give the tables a lot of necessary and proper historical context, shape, if you will, such that the theoretical takes its rightful place well in back of the empirical, the observed. Tight numbers, right numbers, or so we believe, unabashedly biasedly. Others are free to disagree, but we know what will work best for our way of handicapping, for our software, for the way we analyze Thoroughbred horse races.
In the end, then, your 2013 par charts are more than 15,000 records that comprehensively — dare we have the hubris to say accurately! — depict the pace-and-speed characteristics of North American racetracks vis-a-vis the distances and classes of runners thereto. An understanding of these characteristics, such as these par times provide, can prove helpful in better assessing the demonstrated pace-and-speed abilities of horseys, especially as they ship in from tracks different to today’s or else come in from different distances or class-levels or, indeed, all three.
You can also use these pars to generate time-honored, classic-practice daily variants or to serve as the basis for any number of figure-and-rating schemes. As well, we include recommendations for their use not widely distributed in the literature.
Right, then. Yesterday, first day of touting with the new 2013 par times: Frantic City opener went to top-touted Colorful Image, 3½-1 in real life, 10-1 on the cockeyed morning line. LifeLiner put her 97-93-72 in a race in which the top LifeLiner Speed Number was 78. She ran to the prohibitive early-speed and pace ratings LifeLiner assigned her (lucky!) and held on by a dirty nose.
Later there, Race 4, Bonkersmate Big Fisherman was at the bottom (!) of the Betting Line, sunk to the bottom! The Betting Line was a headscratcher, though, and that reset the race so all the horseys could be reconsidered, even Big Fisherman. Big Fisherman obliged via a competitive 83 on LifeLiner Speed, second-best in the wide-open race. Big Fisherman, 20-1 on the morning line but bet-down to 6-1, ran to win at $14.80. As frequently happens, the runner-up did not coöperate on any of our measures.
Belmont opened yesterday; nothing.
Bonkersmate Cha Cha Latte took the BFHollyPark opener, $17.40, thanks to a second-best 95 LifeLiner Speed Column number. Again, no luck with the place-beast.
Second Bonkersmate Sarava’s Dancer held on gamely in Kee 7, $28.60. Solid numbers across the LifeLiner Early-Pace-Speed array, qualifying 80+s from gate-to-wire, which was the mode of victory. Again, the runner-up proved elusive.
Waywardwillie was top-touted in the Tampa finale, and it was nearly was a King of the NetCapper Bullies ending, runner-up at 9-1; this time, though, the 4-1 top LifeLiner Speed number on El Legado came through for the gettable $118 insurance exacta. Amazingly, the remaining three super-five-high runners qualified on LifeLiner: $281 trizacta (for $2), $3,805 super-duper, unclaimed super-five-high. Next time!
Wow, what a finish in the seventh at Pimlico, with the first five separated a mere length-and-a-quarter at the wire. Turf, of course, five furlongs, of course, and solitary tout Roar of the Crowd was an honourable fourth at 28-1. Too bad, because top LifeLiner Proficient was the winner. (Proficient not touted, being only 5-1 on the morning line; remember, this style of longshot touting disregards any runners below 8-1 on the morning line. This is injudicious! Yet it saves greatly on unnecessary mental anguish and indecision, at least when it comes to the touting; in real life, with the clock ticking, there is no need for well-prior-to-the-race exclusionary tactics, yeah?)
Turf Paradise 8, and Of Royalty was the lone tout, 10-1 morning line and the lone qualifying 80 in LifeLiner Speed, the rest mired in the 70s and 60s; winner, $10.20 by almost seventh lengths, gate-to-wire from a LifeLiner rating line of 98-85-81 with no one else even close to those scores. Lucky again. It happens. Confirmation bias. Lucky.
One more was the sixth at Golden Gate, in which Localsuccess was the top touted runner, 10-1 morning line but coming off a near-year layoff. Sent off at 16.60-1, Localsuccess ran to that billing and paid $35.20 to win. LifeLiner had Localsuccess in the hunt via a 90, second-best in the field. Top mark went to the obvious and odds-on (3-5) Candy’s Success, and the longshot-on-top exacta was $64.
Good results, then, on Day 1 of touting with the 2013 Cynthia Publishing Company par times. Lucky. Confirmation bias. Those tricks and conceits. If you have not used V6 in a long time, you will enjoy LifeLiner — there is nothing out there like it. It is not infallible, but it is different and different in a competent way that has not yet been pirated. Maybe they will figure it out somehow, but for now they are still chasing us. For once.
We should like to share LifeLiner with you, but there are so many skeptics out there; there is too much effective marketing and we are not competing well in the arena. No complaints, only observations. As well, a larger problem exists when people purchase handicapping software of any kind: they want it to be a magic bullet, which it may indeed be! But when more likely it isn’t, they start having weird relationships with the software, especially with regards to ignoring it or doing the opposite or trying to outsmart it.
This is wholly understandable. When a guy puts down a good amount of money on software, he wants it to work. If it doesn’t he wants to rush to take control, he wants to be active, he wants to do something. In short, he wants to try to outsmart the computer. This is wholly understandable. A guy has enough money to buy software, he’s probably doing all right for himself in the real world, making a lot of money, typically via active, hands-on, Type A hypervigilance and micromanaging! Can you see where this is headed? Of course! He wants to micromanage the computer. He wants to tighten his grip, he wants to avenge and take over.
The ego is a wonderful thing, especially when it is healthy. In horseracing, though, the ego can become a little inflated. Manipulative and shot-calling proactivity that works for big machers in the real world is not often rewarded at the mutuels; too many forces at play beyond the big macher’s usual control. It hurts! The ego is bruised. This is the bane of all software-peddlers; the clients always know better, or so they believe, especially when they are spending so much money on the software and the data and all of it. It is wholly understandable.
There is a wonderful book of tennis instruction called “The Inner Game of Tennis”. In it, the author, a Harvard graduate and successful businessman, recommends that the improving tennis player “quiet his mind”, or words to that effect. He prefers that the player play by instinct, letting the body do what it needs. He warns that the ego and the brain are tricky bad actors. They think their knowledge is supreme. Yet the body has its own self-knowledge. If you have successfully walked and chewed gum at the same time and not tripped and choked at the same time, you understand this concept. You let the body do its thing.
The ego is OK with this, since the stakes are low. The ego is not invested in successfully walking and chewing gum at the same time. There’s no reward for it. However, it is most definitely interested in winning a tennis match — there might be a trophy or a large check at the end of it! So if things are going poorly, the ego wrests control, literally, and thinks it can outsmart the body.
So you can see why the typical purchaser of software becomes disenchanted, disillusioned. It’s not a magic bullet, he wants to involve his ego in every last facet of it, etc., tries to outsmart the computer.
For a moment, suspend ego and consider the Eastern idea of Beginner’s Mind. What does beginner’s mind know about pace or speed or class or form? Nothing! Now consider some budding handicapper with Beginner’s Mind who enters via V6 and LifeLiner. He will find a way to make it work no matter that it does not mention feet-per-second or have fractals or friction coefficients, etc. That is Enlightenment.
LifeLiner. The leading proponents of the Sartinez Methodism used to have a hocus-pocus saying about their numbers in the 1990s: “They just work”. No one laughed at them. In fact, they were duly worshiped in a a fawning, MLM, Amway-type way. Perhaps we can be accorded the same sort of license. Not to be worshiped, but at least to be listened to if we let it slip out about the LineLiner: “It just works”. Perhaps.
Also, it appears the Sartinez Methodism self-destructed. It was impermanent. Yet Cynthia Publishing Company moseys along, 30 years from its inception, an entity still active and recognized when it is discussed, and perhaps it shall be so 30 years from today. It’s a wonder how things turn out. Sometimes. No one could have charted the impolosion of the Roman Catholic Church, Pennsylvania State University gridiron American Throwball or printed newspapers, the GOP. It’s a wonder how things turn out.
So, V6 and LifeLiner, running numbers through the 2013 par times. If you take a deep breath, trust the computer, don’t try too hard, let the universe come to you a little, you should do OK. You should have a better feel for what it takes to engage in enjoyable if not necessarily profitable longshot handicapping-touting. If you listen a little, if you observe and pay attention a little more instead of leaping to conclusions, instead of jumping ship, instead of insisting that the computer cannot possibly be right, instead of hitting the send button on the message boards, instead of rushing to Twitter & Facethingy to badmouth your experience, if you can resist your meddlesome ego, you should do OK; you should do better than you have been, and with much less needless stress and irritation and frustration on your part. Nothing is guaranteed, and the ego is an insatiable beast. But you should do better. In short, don’t drop everything just to play wet-nurse to your ego and to your pride. It’s probably better to resist that sort of immediacy.
At the end of all this commentary comes a simple truth: perspective. It’s easy to lose it when the last race of the day comes and there is no way to bail out of a negative day. It’s even easier to lose it when the last race of the day comes and there is no way you can possibly give back everything you’ve already won up to then! (Those days, make more of them, please, OK, Universe? Well, OK, not really.)
In the end, the journey is better than the inn. M. Cramer and Cervantes, smart guys, and both exceedingly correct. Cervantes was also correct in portraying Quixote as living life insanely yet dying sane at the very end. Most people do this the other way round, and it makes for an unpleasant trip: if you live life entirely sanely, how boring must that be. Bukowski put it much more vitally: “Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.” Yes. The world is rational and left-brained enough, and look where it has gotten us. So quick to judge, judge, judge based on the stupidest things, like the clothes you wear, personal hygiene, what you drive, the Schools You Attended. Really? The ego is the left-brain, the 1 percent, shouting down the 99 percent that might have something worthwhile to contribute. Where’s the balance?
We leave you with a wonderful story, one we first encountered in another tennis-instruction book, this one called Zennis. This story has been around all over the place, but we first saw it in the Zennis book.
There is a Taoist story of an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit.
“Such bad luck” they said sympathetically.
“We’ll see,” the farmer replied.
The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses.
“How wonderful,” the neighbors exclaimed.
“We’ll see,” replied the old man.
The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune.
“We’ll see,” answered the farmer.
The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son’s leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out.
“We’ll see” said the farmer.
You can tell who the neighbors are: 24/7 media, Facethingie, Twitter, everything else rushing to judgment, people posting 50,000 times on a single message board. Be the farmer. Have the perspective. You never know. No one ever knows.
P.S. Another bit of wisdom from life in general and tennis in specific. Once when playing, we missed a shot, and badly. The lady playing with us as our partner was not angry. She simply smiled and said, “Next time…” Wisdom was with her.
Commerce! 99 percent Buddha, 1 percent Henry Ford. Can the two meet in the middle somehow? Where’s the balance?
2013 PARS PLUS
Standalone Kentucky Oaks & Derby Analyses
All-In-One V6
Trainers
Daily Touting
Assorted Other Madness
As well from Bukowski:
—unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don’t do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don’t do it.
when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.
there is no other way.
and there never was.—
In the end, we hope something good will come out of all this for yourself. We can’t expect, but we can hope. We do our best, despite all the tendencies otherwise. As well, we fondly hope that this did not waste your time even once, but even if it did that you might give us 49,999 other chances to make it right.
WMF Report:
Early
Beulah 5½f
Chas. Town 6½f, 7f
Finger 4½f
Hawthorne 6f
Pimlico 6f
Turf Paradise 6f
Nocturnal Submission: Srsly? Night off! Maybe as a reply to this post. Maybe. First, some deep breaths are required. Time to inhale.
Thank you. Best wishes. Goodbye. Take care now.
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First Post: Saturday, April 27, 2013
This post, it’s the “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” of “First Posts”. It’s the live version of “Freebird” by the band remembered as Leonard Skinner. It’s like what they call the Tantric Sex, paid out slowly and discursively, with much meaningful eye-contact and delayed gratification; however, unlike the Tantric Sex, this one may have no payoff to speak of. None! This is our attempt to make one post speak with more character than 50,000 posts from elsewhere combined. Let’s begin…
Free ones: Rundown…
Frantic City 1, 2, 3, 6
Belmont 5, 8, 10
Calder 3, 9, 10, 12
BFHollyPark 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10
Day 2 of touting from V6 loaded with 2013 pars.
Pay-side: Today…
Churchill 3, 6, 8, 11
Tampa 2, 6, 7
Pimlico 3, 7, 9, 10
Hawthorne 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
Woodbine 4, 6, 10
Lone Star 3, 4, 8, 10
To repeat: Day 2 of touting from V6 loaded with 2013 parsz.
Today’s Stakes Pageantry: Thirty-four added-money events for your Saturday. Have you checked ’em all out?
In the time it took you to turn to the first of them, alphabetically, Race 4 at Belmont, the Tweedside, V6 was already finished doing the numbers and output for all 34. Something to think about. (By the way, for posterity, for the Tweedside, it’s #6 Alyadorable gaining vaunted Triple Threat Horsey status.)
So, yes, that now gives us plenty (plenty!) of time to discuss some of them here, and in such a way that is — at least to us — rational and orderly and consistent. The approach is steady. There is no worry of what factors to emphasize, whether to worry about lone-speed or a bunch of closers or a class-edge or a hot trainer or any of that. It’s relaxing. Calm. Like a Calgon bath, except there’s no beautiful, naked woman sitting in the tub. Not this week, anyway.
Truly, how can you possibly keep it in your head to run down 34 stakes races and figure out what to look and then once you’ve figured that out to then have to do the math and the comparisons and the plottin’ an’ analyzin’ to come up with, well, what exactly? The winner, some contenders? A false favourite? An unplayable race?
How do you do it? This is not a rhetorical question like they are fond of posing (literally, with a good deal of upper-body gestures, too!) in those TED Talxsz. This is a serious question. How do you get all the approaches and plans of attack lined up for your 34 stakes races today, Saturday, then apply those approaches and execute those plans of attack and make sure it’s all the way you expect it to turn out? That would be fascinating stuff to see how the great handicappers of the world would do these 34 stakes races for your Saturday.
Now, we here are not so lucky. We are the dreamers, the impractical, the luftmentschen, the soft-skilled artistes and English literature majors of the world and other assorted liberal artsz freaksz who nonetheless enjoy a nice, stimulating, maybe therapeutic, once in a while profitable day at the hippodrome. For those of us who fit this mold — hey, it’s OK to admit it — those of us who don’t have a supercomputer for a brain, IBM’s Watson for a brain, who won’t be able to whip open the Everyday Racing Gazette and do absolutely flawless handicapping in our heads from just the past performances, an adjunct like the V6 can prove helpful, if not sanity-preserving.
It’s not that romantic to say this, but when you handicap, how much do you really know? Who is to say which factors will be the right factors to choose in analyzing the Tweedside here? Then when we move on after the Tweedside, to the Westchester later on in the Belmont card, will those factors we decided were important for the Tweedside be equally applicable to the Westchester? And so on down the line, to the end of the series, 32 stakes races later. (“But it’s stakes races all the way down!” Wait. What happened to the turtlesz?)
Therein lies the problem with most modern handicapping schemes: we assume too much control over everything in the process, from deciding which factors to emphasize to how best to express, qualitatively or quantitatively, those factors. And that’s not even yet to consider the biggest and most flawed assumption of all: that every last actor (as in each horsey, each jockey, each trainer, each stall in the starting gate, each speck of dirt or blade of grass on the course) and agent (as in one who carries out the agency of the race itself) on the racetrack will conform to the control being exerted from space beneath the size 7¼ hat size in our skulls. Real Svengali stuff! Who knew that to be a great handicapper you had to have skills in telekinesis, too! They didn’t cover that in Recreational Pace Strategies or Speed Makes the Steed.
But there are people who exist who can do this. If you are one of them, continued success. We envy you. For the rest of us supremely ungifted horse-race analysts, a workable approach other than Type-A micromanagement control-freak manipulation would be to devise a reasonably sound and consistent set of the analyses applied unfailingly to all the races, all the time, all the same, followed closely by seeing, rather quickly, too, what sort of probability array comes forth. This is a fancy sort of Sartinez Methodism way of saying: competitive race or not? one solid selection or two? or all the horseys have some kind of reasonable, measurable chance? Let’s begin there. Let’s first determine the shape of the race, and not the speed shape or the pace shape or the class shape of the race, either. Rather, let’s make a modest beginning and figure out who can win. We don’t have to pick the winner or a most likely winner; all we must do is see who can win.
Of course we will not always get this modest beginning completely right. But we should be able to get it right enough of the time such that when we’re not right it would be better to just let it go than to try to learn some kind of lesson from it. (That’s another thing that we find interesting: expecting a handicapping lesson from each race you get wrong. Hmmmmm. To believe you can learn a lesson from a race you lost, is by logical extension to believe also that the lesson you just learned will absolutely apply unfailingly to the next race you handicap having those same general features. Really? Yet they pay lots of money, a lot of money, to people who can talk glibly and plausibly after the races on TVRTV and HGN; minimum requirements are straight, white teeth, and the rest is negotiable.)
All right, all right. So where were we? Oh, yeah, seeing who can win, determining which horseys have a chance. We don’t have to get to ground-level precision to make these determinations; ther’s no need to settle on pace over speed, or form over class, or whatever. We just need a high-level view of who the real contention is.
Once we have that, we can start naming horseys. If the race isn’t contentious, we’re probably better off staying toward the top of the ratings; in the theme-park free-for-all that is the contentious race, however, everything is in play, like the balls in a lotto hopper or the slots on a roulette wheel.
That’s the gist of it. It sounds primitive, but it allows for the dabbling, dilettante handicapper to be able to pursue other interests in life, such as practicing mindfulness, attaining physical fitness, reading good books, listening to worthwhile podcasts and lectures, stumbling through the salsa and merengue, coaxing (bribing?) a one-eyed Pug dog through a hula-hoop, that sort of thing. And writing (writing!). Yeah, that and watching Jeopardy! Monday-through-Friday, check your local listings for time and channel.
But, while we are here to address your concerns, we would probably consider speed to be the best predictor. Yup. Dumb old speed. Final-time speed. Not very exciting, no Factor X, no Vector Percentage Middle, no Mandlebrot Deceleratory-Tendency Ratingsz, no Hypersensitive-Friction-Coefficents Per NanoSecond. Nope. But there it is: final-time speed. Early speed is OK, pace is OK, but they’re problematic in that they are so capricious and subject to noise and randomness. For instance, when we were hand-checking and handcrafting the parsz, the range of first-call variance was ridiculous. It’s embarrassingly theoretical to try to predict the running time of the first two furlongs of a race. Damn hard. Difficult. Guessing. Even though Quirin encouraged us to find the leader at the first call to get a wild profit, how come it&rsuqo;s not been done methodologically or consistently in the subsequent literature? How come? That should answer that question.
And it makes sense. Like they used to say about class in a racehorse, a claimer is a Ford and a stakes horse is a Cadillac (mind you, this was in the 1970s when there weren’t too many reliable foreign luxury marques around!). You step on the gas on the Ford and on the Cadillac and the Ford will keep up for a bit, but then the Cadillac starts speeding away eventually. So it is for early-speed and pace schemes: yes, maiden-claimers (especially in turf-routes!) will run as fast as Graded animals for your first four furlongs — routinely! But by the time they hit the wire, it’s 15 or 18 lengths the other way, at least. Which side of that equation will it be more beneficial for you to be on?
So, to answer your burning questions: speed is the key. Beyer was not wrong in emphasizing it. Looking back, it seems a little disappointing and uncharacteristically cowardly that he turned-tail and softened his anti-pace position in his second book, The Winning Horseplayer. As a predictor, it, final-time, has no equal. Final-time handicapping is where the real qualities of the horseys just stand out so clearly. Now, the famous Icelandic rock group the Sugarcubes did a song called “Speed Is the Key”. It’s manic. Bjork is literally hooting her way through this Icelandic alt-rock romp. “Speed Is the Key” by The Sugarcubes, check it out on iTunes or some such. Who knew that handicapping was so big in Reykjavik?!
Hold your emails, hold your nasty emails, kindly. Early speed and pace have their moments, in isolation, if you can get to that level of precision where you think one horsey has the goods through the first four furlongs; however, in our scheme of touting, we never want to get too close to the handicapping itself. It’s a Nate Silverstein-type thing: yes, the election is decided precinct-by-precinct, block-by-block in a sliver of Ohio; however, aggregations of the analyses are sufficient to make the call — no need to canvass each household individually. No need, Johnnie, no need. Not unless you like to make a show of yourself and of your expertise, so-called.
V6, then, LifeLiner, especially. That LifeLiner Speed Column. The one to the right of the Early Column and to the right of the Pace Column, in combination with the shape of the Betting Line, a Decent Way to Play the Races While Maintaining a Semblance of Variety & Humanity In Your Otherwise Monomaniacal Existence. Many facets of V6 have been stolen and pirated through the years, but they have not got to LifeLiner yet. May they always remain thwarted! Try it — the method, not the pirating. Try it. You never know. There is theory and there is the observed; what you hear in the streets is theory, what you read from sketchy sources is theory, and, indeed, it may in fact turn out that, yes, the theory becomes the observed; but until you have done the observing yourself, with all your own faculties and senses, all you have is the theory. Will the theory keep you warm at night, darling? Will it?
Your Honour, by submission of this screed, we should like to establish our bona fides. Thank you. Best wishesz. Now we resume the touting.
BFHollyPark 3, 5, 8, 9 & 10 are on the free page.
Haw 6 & 8 on the pay-side. So is Pim 10.
The Grade III Derby Trial is CD 10, and it is an open affair. The top two morning-line horseys make sense, as does #9 Titletown Five. Not much clarity.
On the surface, GG 6, the Grade III S.F. Mile, looks contentious; however, #1 Tigah somehow sneaks in to snatch vauned Triple Threat Horsey status in it. Wow.
Down the 101 (U.S. 101) and over to the 405 (I-405) — Californians willfully neglect the highway-type, U.S. Highway or Interstate— when speaking of the local roads. So down U.S. 101 and over to I-405 to Inglewood for Triple Threat Horsey status to #5 Derby Gold (!) in the sixth, the Grey Memo.
(An aside, Race 4 today at BFHollyPark is named for Melair. She was a racehorse and a half. Even though we only saw her through a vintage Motorola television with a scratchy speaker hanging from the rafters at Frantic City via simulcast, nothing could obscure her brilliance. She beat the boys in that race we saw, the Golden Sun beginning to set on the screen even though it was dark outside near the Jersey Shore. If recollection is correct, maybe even it was one of those extended-chute 1-turn Hollywood Park races back in the day. She took away the breath positively.)
More Triple Threat Horseys now, this one in Race 2 at Turf Paradise. #1 Les Claypool (bassist, Primus, right?) can upset as the third-choice on the morning line.
Really good opportunity in EvD 10, the John Henry, if it stays on the grass: #4 Redhotrush and #5 Hit the Road Lee can outrun their forecast long odds, perhaps together.
Good enough is #4 American Sugar in PrM 8, the Goldfinch.
Yesterday’s Activity: Blasted-out yesterday on this here Web log was news that selections, touts and other assorted recommendations made herein were being based on the new, pristine 2013 Cynthia Publishing Company par times.
Always a good feeling, getting the latest numbers. A practical improvement for the V6 in that we cleaned up the extraneous numbers, nearly 5,000 records for which there is no longer use, mainly involving bygone tracks like BM, Pnl, Yav, that sort of thing. So the computations V6 goes through are feeling a little zippier, a little more responsive. Of course, this is probably just a hopeful perception. These computers nowadays are rocketships; unless you have buzzer-reflexes (also known as lockout-device-reflexes and signaling-button-reflexes), you probably won’t feel anything different.
As for the numbers themselves, they are the result of another scanning of the 50,000-odd races that took place on the continent in 2013. And behind those are nearly half a million records amassed over the years to help give the tables a lot of necessary and proper historical context, shape, if you will, such that the theoretical takes its rightful place well in back of the empirical, the observed. Tight numbers, right numbers, or so we believe, unabashedly biasedly. Others are free to disagree, but we know what will work best for our way of handicapping, for our software, for the way we analyze Thoroughbred horse races.
In the end, then, your 2013 par charts are more than 15,000 records that comprehensively — dare we have the hubris to say accurately! — depict the pace-and-speed characteristics of North American racetracks vis-a-vis the distances and classes of runners thereto. An understanding of these characteristics, such as these par times provide, can prove helpful in better assessing the demonstrated pace-and-speed abilities of horseys, especially as they ship in from tracks different to today’s or else come in from different distances or class-levels or, indeed, all three.
You can also use these pars to generate time-honored, classic-practice daily variants or to serve as the basis for any number of figure-and-rating schemes. As well, we include recommendations for their use not widely distributed in the literature.
Right, then. Yesterday, first day of touting with the new 2013 par times: Frantic City opener went to top-touted Colorful Image, 3½-1 in real life, 10-1 on the cockeyed morning line. LifeLiner put her 97-93-72 in a race in which the top LifeLiner Speed Number was 78. She ran to the prohibitive early-speed and pace ratings LifeLiner assigned her (lucky!) and held on by a dirty nose.
Later there, Race 4, Bonkersmate Big Fisherman was at the bottom (!) of the Betting Line, sunk to the bottom! The Betting Line was a headscratcher, though, and that reset the race so all the horseys could be reconsidered, even Big Fisherman. Big Fisherman obliged via a competitive 83 on LifeLiner Speed, second-best in the wide-open race. Big Fisherman, 20-1 on the morning line but bet-down to 6-1, ran to win at $14.80. As frequently happens, the runner-up did not coöperate on any of our measures.
Belmont opened yesterday; nothing.
Bonkersmate Cha Cha Latte took the BFHollyPark opener, $17.40, thanks to a second-best 95 LifeLiner Speed Column number. Again, no luck with the place-beast.
Second Bonkersmate Sarava’s Dancer held on gamely in Kee 7, $28.60. Solid numbers across the LifeLiner Early-Pace-Speed array, qualifying 80+s from gate-to-wire, which was the mode of victory. Again, the runner-up proved elusive.
Waywardwillie was top-touted in the Tampa finale, and it was nearly was a King of the NetCapper Bullies ending, runner-up at 9-1; this time, though, the 4-1 top LifeLiner Speed number on El Legado came through for the gettable $118 insurance exacta. Amazingly, the remaining three super-five-high runners qualified on LifeLiner: $281 trizacta (for $2), $3,805 super-duper, unclaimed super-five-high. Next time!
Wow, what a finish in the seventh at Pimlico, with the first five separated a mere length-and-a-quarter at the wire. Turf, of course, five furlongs, of course, and solitary tout Roar of the Crowd was an honourable fourth at 28-1. Too bad, because top LifeLiner Proficient was the winner. (Proficient not touted, being only 5-1 on the morning line; remember, this style of longshot touting disregards any runners below 8-1 on the morning line. This is injudicious! Yet it saves greatly on unnecessary mental anguish and indecision, at least when it comes to the touting; in real life, with the clock ticking, there is no need for well-prior-to-the-race exclusionary tactics, yeah?)
Turf Paradise 8, and Of Royalty was the lone tout, 10-1 morning line and the lone qualifying 80 in LifeLiner Speed, the rest mired in the 70s and 60s; winner, $10.20 by almost seventh lengths, gate-to-wire from a LifeLiner rating line of 98-85-81 with no one else even close to those scores. Lucky again. It happens. Confirmation bias. Lucky.
One more was the sixth at Golden Gate, in which Localsuccess was the top touted runner, 10-1 morning line but coming off a near-year layoff. Sent off at 16.60-1, Localsuccess ran to that billing and paid $35.20 to win. LifeLiner had Localsuccess in the hunt via a 90, second-best in the field. Top mark went to the obvious and odds-on (3-5) Candy’s Success, and the longshot-on-top exacta was $64.
Good results, then, on Day 1 of touting with the 2013 Cynthia Publishing Company par times. Lucky. Confirmation bias. Those tricks and conceits. If you have not used V6 in a long time, you will enjoy LifeLiner — there is nothing out there like it. It is not infallible, but it is different and different in a competent way that has not yet been pirated. Maybe they will figure it out somehow, but for now they are still chasing us. For once.
We should like to share LifeLiner with you, but there are so many skeptics out there; there is too much effective marketing and we are not competing well in the arena. No complaints, only observations. As well, a larger problem exists when people purchase handicapping software of any kind: they want it to be a magic bullet, which it may indeed be! But when more likely it isn’t, they start having weird relationships with the software, especially with regards to ignoring it or doing the opposite or trying to outsmart it.
This is wholly understandable. When a guy puts down a good amount of money on software, he wants it to work. If it doesn’t he wants to rush to take control, he wants to be active, he wants to do something. In short, he wants to try to outsmart the computer. This is wholly understandable. A guy has enough money to buy software, he’s probably doing all right for himself in the real world, making a lot of money, typically via active, hands-on, Type A hypervigilance and micromanaging! Can you see where this is headed? Of course! He wants to micromanage the computer. He wants to tighten his grip, he wants to avenge and take over.
The ego is a wonderful thing, especially when it is healthy. In horseracing, though, the ego can become a little inflated. Manipulative and shot-calling proactivity that works for big machers in the real world is not often rewarded at the mutuels; too many forces at play beyond the big macher’s usual control. It hurts! The ego is bruised. This is the bane of all software-peddlers; the clients always know better, or so they believe, especially when they are spending so much money on the software and the data and all of it. It is wholly understandable.
There is a wonderful book of tennis instruction called “The Inner Game of Tennis”. In it, the author, a Harvard graduate and successful businessman, recommends that the improving tennis player “quiet his mind”, or words to that effect. He prefers that the player play by instinct, letting the body do what it needs. He warns that the ego and the brain are tricky bad actors. They think their knowledge is supreme. Yet the body has its own self-knowledge. If you have successfully walked and chewed gum at the same time and not tripped and choked at the same time, you understand this concept. You let the body do its thing.
The ego is OK with this, since the stakes are low. The ego is not invested in successfully walking and chewing gum at the same time. There’s no reward for it. However, it is most definitely interested in winning a tennis match — there might be a trophy or a large check at the end of it! So if things are going poorly, the ego wrests control, literally, and thinks it can outsmart the body.
So you can see why the typical purchaser of software becomes disenchanted, disillusioned. It’s not a magic bullet, he wants to involve his ego in every last facet of it, etc., tries to outsmart the computer.
For a moment, suspend ego and consider the Eastern idea of Beginner’s Mind. What does beginner’s mind know about pace or speed or class or form? Nothing! Now consider some budding handicapper with Beginner’s Mind who enters via V6 and LifeLiner. He will find a way to make it work no matter that it does not mention feet-per-second or have fractals or friction coefficients, etc. That is Enlightenment.
LifeLiner. The leading proponents of the Sartinez Methodism used to have a hocus-pocus saying about their numbers in the 1990s: “They just work”. No one laughed at them. In fact, they were duly worshiped in a a fawning, MLM, Amway-type way. Perhaps we can be accorded the same sort of license. Not to be worshiped, but at least to be listened to if we let it slip out about the LineLiner: “It just works”. Perhaps.
Also, it appears the Sartinez Methodism self-destructed. It was impermanent. Yet Cynthia Publishing Company moseys along, 30 years from its inception, an entity still active and recognized when it is discussed, and perhaps it shall be so 30 years from today. It’s a wonder how things turn out. Sometimes. No one could have charted the impolosion of the Roman Catholic Church, Pennsylvania State University gridiron American Throwball or printed newspapers, the GOP. It’s a wonder how things turn out.
So, V6 and LifeLiner, running numbers through the 2013 par times. If you take a deep breath, trust the computer, don’t try too hard, let the universe come to you a little, you should do OK. You should have a better feel for what it takes to engage in enjoyable if not necessarily profitable longshot handicapping-touting. If you listen a little, if you observe and pay attention a little more instead of leaping to conclusions, instead of jumping ship, instead of insisting that the computer cannot possibly be right, instead of hitting the send button on the message boards, instead of rushing to Twitter & Facethingy to badmouth your experience, if you can resist your meddlesome ego, you should do OK; you should do better than you have been, and with much less needless stress and irritation and frustration on your part. Nothing is guaranteed, and the ego is an insatiable beast. But you should do better. In short, don’t drop everything just to play wet-nurse to your ego and to your pride. It’s probably better to resist that sort of immediacy.
At the end of all this commentary comes a simple truth: perspective. It’s easy to lose it when the last race of the day comes and there is no way to bail out of a negative day. It’s even easier to lose it when the last race of the day comes and there is no way you can possibly give back everything you’ve already won up to then! (Those days, make more of them, please, OK, Universe? Well, OK, not really.)
In the end, the journey is better than the inn. M. Cramer and Cervantes, smart guys, and both exceedingly correct. Cervantes was also correct in portraying Quixote as living life insanely yet dying sane at the very end. Most people do this the other way round, and it makes for an unpleasant trip: if you live life entirely sanely, how boring must that be. Bukowski put it much more vitally: “Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.” Yes. The world is rational and left-brained enough, and look where it has gotten us. So quick to judge, judge, judge based on the stupidest things, like the clothes you wear, personal hygiene, what you drive, the Schools You Attended. Really? The ego is the left-brain, the 1 percent, shouting down the 99 percent that might have something worthwhile to contribute. Where’s the balance?
We leave you with a wonderful story, one we first encountered in another tennis-instruction book, this one called Zennis. This story has been around all over the place, but we first saw it in the Zennis book.
There is a Taoist story of an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit.
“Such bad luck” they said sympathetically.
“We’ll see,” the farmer replied.
The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses.
“How wonderful,” the neighbors exclaimed.
“We’ll see,” replied the old man.
The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune.
“We’ll see,” answered the farmer.
The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son’s leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out.
“We’ll see” said the farmer.
You can tell who the neighbors are: 24/7 media, Facethingie, Twitter, everything else rushing to judgment, people posting 50,000 times on a single message board. Be the farmer. Have the perspective. You never know. No one ever knows.
P.S. Another bit of wisdom from life in general and tennis in specific. Once when playing, we missed a shot, and badly. The lady playing with us as our partner was not angry. She simply smiled and said, “Next time…” Wisdom was with her.
Commerce! 99 percent Buddha, 1 percent Henry Ford. Can the two meet in the middle somehow? Where’s the balance?
2013 PARS PLUS
Standalone Kentucky Oaks & Derby Analyses
All-In-One V6
Trainers
Daily Touting
Assorted Other Madness
As well from Bukowski:
—unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don’t do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don’t do it.
when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.
there is no other way.
and there never was.—
In the end, we hope something good will come out of all this for yourself. We can’t expect, but we can hope. We do our best, despite all the tendencies otherwise. As well, we fondly hope that this did not waste your time even once, but even if it did that you might give us 49,999 other chances to make it right.
WMF Report:
Early
Beulah 5½f
Chas. Town 6½f, 7f
Finger 4½f
Hawthorne 6f
Pimlico 6f
Turf Paradise 6f
Nocturnal Submission: Srsly? Night off! Maybe as a reply to this post. Maybe. First, some deep breaths are required. Time to inhale.
Thank you. Best wishes. Goodbye. Take care now.
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About Steven Unite
The unofficial spokesperson for the Boys In The Backroom...