Proposing a Profitable and Useful Horserace Betting Gizmo

[mindflayer]

Correct me if I am wrong. (I have only been to the track a few times)
Does not the fact that this calculator exist (in large numbers) and the fact that the House adjusts the odds based on the bets placed make the calculator -EV.


The scenario goes something like this.
YOU have the lone calculator.
Calculator shows odds of favourite to win paying 4:1
Calculator shows his calculated odds of winning 3:1
You make a decent bet on the favourite.
The house does not adjust the odds due to
the small wager you placed.
You win this bet 1 in 3.
It works well and you make money.

You sell a few million calculators.
Everyone at the track has a calculator.
It showes the favourite to win pays same 4:1
It shows his calculated odds of winning are 3:1
The everyone with a calculator makes this bet.
Due to the large number of bets placed on this
horse the House adjusts the odds down to 2.8:1
Favourite wins this race 1 in 3.
Everyone loses.

Is this not like changing horse racing into roulette?!?
Perfect odds could be calculated for each Number (horse) winning and the house would have only a small 3% vig on each bet. Where people bet Outside the odds, the house has a greater advantage because they simply adjust the payout odds down.

[goodsamaritan]

You are right that if these things worked and everybody used them, they would lose their effectiveness. But that would not necessarily stop people from buying them because not everyone would know that.

[danzasmack]

Here's what i don't understand - don't all these calcs go into setting the orignial lines on the horse anyway? Don't people who are much better than us at figuring out who will win do all these calcs?

So then shouldn't we just look for a horse that went from like 5-1 to 7-1 and then bet that one at the last second? Or is this accounted for in the creation of the original lines?

[KLLions]

The bettors market will be > you at figuring out how each of the horses' S.D. should be priced. Everyone has access to the same data. I doubt S.D. is even that useful compared to things like:
added weight
track bias
new jockey
track condition
weather
time btw races
step-up/step-down in class
maidens/claiming/graded stakes in general,
etc

[PairTheBoard]

[ QUOTE ]
What could beat the rake?

[/ QUOTE ]

You're the expert. I'm asking you. Rumor has it you've made significant dough playing the horses. Is this true? Is this the method you use?

PairTheBoard

[Red Stine]

[ QUOTE ]


Sometimes the way the race is run causes the winner to be a horse other than the one who would have the best time in individual time trials for that distance.

[/ QUOTE ]

Sometimes?

[ QUOTE ]
More often though the winner IS that horse, especially if his time trial is significantly faster.

[/ QUOTE ]

More often?

[ QUOTE ]
But those speed ratings predict the winner less than a third of the time. One reason is the aforementioned fact that how the race is run can cause the best horse to lose.

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QED

[Borodog]

One million trials:

P(1) = 0.304531
P(2) = 0.273505
P(3) = 0.118405
P(4) = 0.084406
P(5) = 0.219153

Note that the horse with the worst average time is the third most likely to win, because of his large standard deviation.

Ten million trials produces similar results to within 1 part in a thousand.

[PairTheBoard]

[ QUOTE ]
Correct me if I am wrong. (I have only been to the track a few times)
Does not the fact that this calculator exist (in large numbers) and the fact that the House adjusts the odds based on the bets placed make the calculator -EV.


The scenario goes something like this.
YOU have the lone calculator.
Calculator shows odds of favourite to win paying 4:1
Calculator shows his calculated odds of winning 3:1
You make a decent bet on the favourite.
The house does not adjust the odds due to
the small wager you placed.
You win this bet 1 in 3.
It works well and you make money.

You sell a few million calculators.
Everyone at the track has a calculator.
It showes the favourite to win pays same 4:1
It shows his calculated odds of winning are 3:1
The everyone with a calculator makes this bet.
Due to the large number of bets placed on this
horse the House adjusts the odds down to 2.8:1
Favourite wins this race 1 in 3.
Everyone loses.

Is this not like changing horse racing into roulette?!?
Perfect odds could be calculated for each Number (horse) winning and the house would have only a small 3% vig on each bet. Where people bet Outside the odds, the house has a greater advantage because they simply adjust the payout odds down.

[/ QUOTE ]

I believe this is pretty much what happened with the Ziemba betting system. Ziemba noticed that often times the Ratios of funds bet in the Show Pool did not match the Ratios in the Win Pool. The Show Pool funds for the Favorite were often underrepresented compared to bets on the Favorite to Win. In other words, the Favorite was underbet To Show because people don't like bets with small payoffs.

In Ziemba's study of data he concluded that if the Favorite is underbet by 50% To Show, you can get an edge over the Track Rake by betting him to show. The trouble is that Ziema type bettors soon popped up at all the racetracks pumping bets into the Show Pool on the Favorite thereby eliminating this arbitrage oportunity. You can see this happening if you're sitting at a Casino Race Book. Five minutes before the Bell they will flash the Mutual Pools showing an underbet Show Pool for the Favorite. After the race is run and they flash the Final Mutual Pool you will see the Favorite Show Pool disparity will have disappeared. The bets made in the last 5 minutes by Ziemba bettors will have eliminated the arbitrage, or at least reduced it so that it's no longer enough to beat the Track Rake.

PairTheBoard

[poincaraux]

I don't know anything about horse races. Is it obvious that you should be using a normal distribution, rather than something asymmetric? E.g. does horse A really have same chance of running a 95.5 second race as a 100.5 second race?

[Bucky-Dat]

I think that the focus of the gizmo needs to be exploiting the imperfect market that comprises the pari-mutuel pools to make +EV wagers I think that the focus of the gizmo needs to be exploiting the imperfect market that comprises the pari-mutuel pools to make +EV wagers given what the handicapper estimates the probability of each horse finishing in a particular place is.

The value of the gizmo as a predictive tool seems small given it will be utilizing only an estimated finish time and standard deviation.

I would think such a gizmo would be a must have for serious horse players, allowing them to “line shop” (pool shop?).