Class Handicapping

[philcski]

Originally Posted by the_fat_man

Rather than fighting change and trying to get a reaction out of me, you might want to consider a suggestion:

Watching replays intently at KEE is pretty much a waste of valuable time. This is because with TRAKUS you get a more precise sense of how the race was run. The idea, is to GENERALIZE. I'm not so much concerned as to what happened in a particular race to a particular horse as much as I'm interested in how a particular angle/situation generalizes. Once I'm at this point, i.e., have formulated a method of identifying 'mismatches', I can then play multiple tracks. The idea behind winning today is to find these prime plays, and as many of them as you possibly can. It allows you to not force plays.

If I have an automated pace/speed system in place, I can easily spot mismatches at multiple tracks. Why in the world would I want to spend hours watching races when I can see from a chart who ran against the grain and who didn't?

As for how a track is playing, the charts instantly show this. I don't buy into all the modeling of tracks BS; if this was of any value, then all the Sartinistas would be counting their winnings rather than spending even more money on yet another program.

The idea, broadly, is to model in a way that allows you to play ANY track, without preparation, without specific modeling, without figures, etc. If I'm spending more than 5 minutes to handicap a race, then I'm wasting valuable time.

Obviously that would be the truth, the light, an ideal situation- but I've in fact tried modeling and backtesting it and it doesn't work. It identifies too many false positives, especially on synthetic. For example, from today's 7th at KEE, Bigshot would have been identified by a computer model as an absolute gold PRIME play because of his closing performance against the strong speed bias on the 8th in the Alcomatch race- which a human analysis would conclude as skeptical at best because it fell so far outside of the rest of the day. Likewise, being able to toss his performance and reanalyzing without that he was an easy toss at 5/2.