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Originally Posted by King Glorious
Think back to when you first started. Did you know all of the trends and angles?
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Of course not. But then again, at the age of 17, I also never had the audacity to blame the Arlington Park linemaker when I lost. What I did, which seemed second nature to me then, and still does, is learn from it. Learn that fields with first-timers are notoriously dangerous anywhere in a sequence, and equip myself with as much information as possible to get through those legs...or SIT IT OUT. Sour grapes over getting beat by a first-timer from the McPeek barn at Keeneland in the fall is never going to land anywhere but on deaf ears. You don't need to know "all the angles" to know that...you just have to be paying even the slightest bit of attention. Asking people who want to be taken seriously when critiquing the game to do even that little bit beforehand doesn't strike me as too tough a request. We call PETA out when they complain about horse racing for just that reason, right?
My mom is exactly the kind of bettor Kgar is. She goes from time to time when she's in the area, loves the sport, watches on TV, casually plays, and cashes on occasion. She, too, would never blame the morning-line maker for her loss, despite the fact that she doesn't know all the angles, or even most of them for the matter.
Like I said in the other thread, I have all kinds of sympathy for bad beats. I know how they feel. I know how it feels to see HUGE potential pick-4 payoffs and then get beat in the last leg by a horse who winds up with an uncontested lead that never figured even close to getting that trip on paper. Things like that. There are a million ways to lose in this game, and I'm sympathetic to probably more of them than I should be.
Blaming the oddsmaker for your having left a horse out, however, is not one of them.