Nat’l. Hat Day today here in the U.S. You got your chapeau all picked-out for this year’s Derby? Yeah, neither do we. Nevah!
Speaking of the Derby or the derby or the Darby, your first No. London Derby of 2022, scheduled originally for tomorrow at White Hart Lane, has been postponed. Too much COVID-19 among the Arse. We need the respite. We are practicing the Dark Arts by having twisted the arm of the FA into abandoning the match until later. We do not know what the words we just wrote mean, either.
Yesterday there was a lot of handwringing about bad losing streaks, whether those droughts are the natural order of things or just a freak outlier. We shall see. We are thinking that by insisting on a variable edge up-and-down the win-probability spectrum, we are nudging closer to something longer-term viable. If we have sound methods that are vocal in their support of one or two horses, why keep banging our head in pursuit of the elusive win-wager overlay way down the rankings when the handicapping suggests we are already placing 60 or 70 percent of the scenarios outside our reach? In other words, why not play on the side a smaller premium on a stronger-hoped runner instead of a fantastical flyer on a cross-your-fingers contestant? We shall see.
Looking to chop the overhead down to a manageable outlay here. This will mean not only reducing potential wager-candidates in any given race, but also being able to skip three, four races in a row, owing to these stricter premiums dictated by the variable edge.
Riffing. They say if we keep writing words of any kind — horseracing, handicapping, culture, Jeopardy!, sports, music, anything at all — then the long-dormant talent will out, that the old neural pathways and muscle-memory of clacking away on the typer (thanks, Bukowski!) will start firing and forging themselves anew, putting the damned critic and comparer-and-despairer farther and farther from a naturally jumpy and fearful consciousness. It can’t hurt.
When you don’t spend too much time out in the public, for whatever reasons, and your best partners in conversation are a five-year-old mongrel dog and an almost-three-year-old for whom words have not yet come to be weapons or defenses, then there has to be some different outlet for the words to spill out, other than the usual blah-blah-blah of spoken communication. And here we are. They say with the growth mindset, you just keep at it and plugging away until you get to a reasonable level of competence.
This is different from our usual precociousness of many years gone by. We never really tried because either things were handed to us or else we were good enough and got by without striving too much. Self-starters and grinders were beneath us. A bad judgment, now, come to think of it.
But where there’s life there’s hope, and America is your country for the born-again Second Act. Or Third. Or Fourth. It never ends. But that’s probably good.
One of the things that helps is acknowledging Fair Play to people who simply know more than you. A good example came upon us recently. You know how you — you yourself — just know stuff? Maybe it’s how a car engine works and is assembled, or the lyrics of Quiet Riot songs, or how to make artisanal cheese or grow beautiful flowers — whatever. But then when you look at something you absolutely have no idea about, you can’t start pretending, you cannot deceive yourself that you are an expert at that unfamiliar thing.
So that example was looking at a map of the United States. Many of us, nae, maybe most of us, can identify where each state resides on the map, and which states border the others, the general shapes of the states, lakes and rivers, etc.
But then go look at a map of some other place, Africa, Asia, you get the idea. Those countries in those places are like the states in the U.S. map. You know the U.S. map with your eyes closed, but SOMEONE ELSE KNOWS THE AFRICA OR ASIA map the way you do not know those maps. And then you figure out that you do not know it all. It might be disheartening at first, or it could be liberating. It could be liberating in that, hey, you don’t know it all, but also, hey, here are more things for you to get to know WITHOUT PRETENDING YOU ALREADY KNOW IT ALL.
Respect. Mad respect to the experts who do know more about all the subjects that you know little about. The reverse also is true. Mad respect to you if you are an expert at something or many things that very few have any idea about. Good work.
Now, in this day and age of instant boasts and bragging and screaming and yelling, at our fingertips, right under our noses, all day long, tracking us without mercy, it appears that we have come to a place in which PRECIOUS FEW PEOPLE can be bothered to admit that, hey, ‘perhaps somebody else knows more about this than I do, so why don’t I admit that I don’t know the first thing about this and I’m just doing this for performance’s sake’, or at least keep quiet about the stuff they don’t know about, and yield the floor to someone who PROBABLY knows more about this than they do.
It sounds simple and reasonable, but probably because people can’t make money just by keeping their ignorance and inexpertise quiet and hidden, they are compelled for profit and attention to say something ridiculous.
Oh, well. Thus endeth the sermon.
We were looking for some kind of traction in a few races yesterday, namely Golden Gate 6, Gulf 10 and Santa Anita 5. In the first of those, two contenders came up, and one of them was overbet to odds-on; the other was an overlayed 6-1 who set the pace all the way and into the furlong grounds before fading. In the Gulf race, two crazy overlays, despite their strong standing on BestLine, ran last and next-to-last. Nominal overlays farther down the line won and ran second, $16.60 to win and $86.60 for the perfecta; no dice. One win overlay in the Santa Anita race, again last at 15-1.
Undaunted, here’s to today via Santa Anita 6, Golden Gate 8, Fair Grounds 7, Gulf 11.
