Thread: L U C K
View Single Post
  #2  
Old 11-03-2021, 03:04 PM
JolyB JolyB is offline
Oriental Park
 
Join Date: Oct 2014
Posts: 3,970
Default

There are lots of reasons why the best horse doesn't always win -- your list includes many of them and every horseplayer could add quite a few more to that. But I hope that you are not suggesting that the winner of a horserace is purely a matter of who is the luckiest. If you are, I strongly disagree.

Year in and year out the wagering favorites tend to win at about a 33% rate. Usually they are made the favorite because the bettors think they are the best horse in the race. If you assume that a race is just a random event won by the luckiest entrant, then [assuming that the average race has about 8 entrants] the favorites or any other entrant should win at about a 12.5% rate. The difference between these numbers tells me that something else is going on. Feel free to quibble about my numbers - the average size might be somewhat larger or smaller but I hope you see my point.

Handicappers spend a large amount of time examining the merits of the runners to figure out who are the best horses. The successful ones then look at the odds to answer the tougher question of whether the price they will get if this horse wins is large enough to also cover the possibility that their pick could lose if it encounters any of the bad luck elements you listed.

p.s. - any golfer will tell you that there have been days when they hit the ball very well but scored poorly because of unlucky bounces or poor lies,and days when they hit poor shorts that somehow turned out all right due to good fortune. How good they were that day is important but only part of the overall equation.
Reply With Quote