Santa Anita Showvivor

[ranger5830]

Astoundingly and as a complete surprise, sgtennis' quest for showvivor glory and riches has (at least temporarily) hit a snag, as his attempt to pick a 44th straight show horse came up short as his (presumed) pick, heavy favorite Wandering Heart in race 1, could only manage a fourth place finish in a field of five, thereby dashing his hopes for wrapping up the title, as well as costing the bridgejumping community about $129,722.

So, as far as the contest is concerned, I have an unexpected second chance at winning, as we somehow are going to wind up tied at 43 in a row. There are only two players left with any real hope of beating that number, one has 22 in a row and one has 21. There are three players at 16 in a row who could conceivably get to 43, but two of them are hopelessly far behind in the tiebreak, they have 27, 19, and 14 wins respectively. The player with 14 actually cannot win under any circumstance. I am two wins behind, 41 to 39, but that can certainly be made up with still 27 race days left, especially since second tiebreak is most places, and I have a comfortable lead there, 22 to 17.

It's a shame someone has to lose, as it was a great accomplishment to get to 43, as nobody else even got above 31 in a row. I was thinking about trying to reach out to sgtennis and see if he wants to split the money, maybe give him a little extra since he has the tiebreak lead, do you think that would be a good idea? If he is a tennis consultant, he must be reputable and a man of good character, and I would certainly never stiff anyone on a bet. I don't know if that is against the rules or somehow considered collusion or something. Anyway, wish me luck!

[Dunbar]

Originally Posted by ranger5830

Astoundingly and as a complete surprise, sgtennis' quest for showvivor glory and riches has (at least temporarily) hit a snag, as his attempt to pick a 44th straight show horse came up short as his (presumed) pick, heavy favorite Wandering Heart in race 1, could only manage a fourth place finish in a field of five, thereby dashing his hopes for wrapping up the title, as well as costing the bridgejumping community about $129,722.

So, as far as the contest is concerned, I have an unexpected second chance at winning, as we somehow are going to wind up tied at 43 in a row. There are only two players left with any real hope of beating that number, one has 22 in a row and one has 21. There are three players at 16 in a row who could conceivably get to 43, but two of them are hopelessly far behind in the tiebreak, they have 27, 19, and 14 wins respectively. The player with 14 actually cannot win under any circumstance. I am two wins behind, 41 to 39, but that can certainly be made up with still 27 race days left, especially since second tiebreak is most places, and I have a comfortable lead there, 22 to 17.

It's a shame someone has to lose, as it was a great accomplishment to get to 43, as nobody else even got above 31 in a row. I was thinking about trying to reach out to sgtennis and see if he wants to split the money, maybe give him a little extra since he has the tiebreak lead, do you think that would be a good idea? If he is a tennis consultant, he must be reputable and a man of good character, and I would certainly never stiff anyone on a bet. I don't know if that is against the rules or somehow considered collusion or something. Anyway, wish me luck!

Wow! That's amazing! (I didn't see it until just now.) Pretty funny, since I'd written on 5/12, "I hope he misses with #44 and you can race to the wire for the tiebreaker."

I got part way through your post and was thinking, "they should split the prize, with sgtennis getting a bigger share." Then I got to where you were thinking along the same lines.

I doubt splitting is against the rules. It's pretty common in various kinds of tournament play. It's what I would do in your situation. As you said, it's a shame either of you has to lose.

I see you're only 1 behind now. Given the fact that you've got the lead in 2nd tiebreaker, the split should be pretty close to 50-50.

How would you reach out to him/her, though? email address aren't shown in the contest, are they? Ah, I see he has a twitter acct. Which leads to email and phone. Well, I guess I'd read through the Showvivor rules to make sure it's okay, then call him up!

Anyway, good luck down the stretch.

--Dunbar

[Dunbar]

Here's another idea, ranger. You and sgtennis could agree that the eventual winner gets 60% and the loser (2nd place) gets 40%. That way, if he thinks his current 1-game lead is worth something extra, it'll get rewarded at the end if he wins.

--Dunbar

[ranger5830]

I like that idea, I play a lot of poker tournaments and it is common practice that once you get to heads up, to split the money that is left but still leave something to play for to make it interesting. Perhaps $2k each and then leave $1k "on the table" so to speak. I think my lead in the place tiebreak has some value so I think that is a good split. When I wrote that post I was two wins behind but made up one over the weekend, but lost a piece of my total places lead.

When I had my first miss we had a discussion about the importance of field size, I was curious so I went through and evaluated all the odds-on horses at the current meeting so far through Sunday. (Can't say "odds-on favorites" because there was a 4-horse race that had two 9-10 shots.) Anyway, here is what I found:

field size itm% # of applicable horses

4 100 7
5 83.3 30
6 88.2 34
7 80 20
8 84 25
9 85.7 14
10 87.5 8
11 100 3
12 100 2
13 100 1

Obviously it's a very small sample size, but it seems to indicate that field size is not the most important factor, the quality of the horse relative to its competition is, other than the 4 horse fields where you need the favorite to run dead last. Plus in contests like this the horse in the short field will always get more picks. With the 12-13 fields you get very good horses that
lay over the field, for instance the three horses so far that have been odds on have been Dortmund, Gimme da Lute and Shared Belief.

[Dunbar]

That's nice work on the field size, ranger. It makes a good case for your argument.

I can't help but point out that the field sizes 4-6 do better than field sizes 7-13, though. 87.3% vs 84.9%. The only way I can defend dividing "small" and "large" that way, though, is by saying it puts about half the races in each category. (71 races had 4-6 horses, 73 races had 7-13 horses.)

At any rate, I agree with you that whether the fav towers over the other horses is probably more important than field size.

It looks to me like 88% is a reasonable upper bound on the chance of a heavy favorite actually finishing in the money. If all your picks have an 88% chance of finishing in the top 3, there's about a 1 in 240 chance of picking 43 in a row. If you can nudge your picks up to a 90% success rate, the chance of getting 43 in a row is 1 in 93.

[knickslions2]

No need to split Ranger. Just kick his ass the next few weeks. All you need now is to pick winners!!! Best of luck

[ranger5830]

So the contest goes on, and we are now down to 16 racing days left. Unfortunately I fell another win behind sgtennis and am now down by two, 46-44. Hardly insurmountable but certainly can't fall any further behind. I am very limited in what I can say due to the unique nature of playing basically against one person instead of 4500+, I'll just say that I'm trying to pick as many winners as I can.

I've decided just to play it out and not seek a split due to all the uncertainties involved, tax reasons, etc. plus while significant, the amount involved is not really life-changing. But I hope to use it to fund a trip to Saratoga for Travers week, I'm going either way but I'll have a lot more fun if I have an extra 5k to spend.