Showing posts with label Miley Cyrus. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Miley Cyrus. Show all posts

  • The Truth about Losing Streaks

    POSTED Dec 5, 2013 By Derek Simon
    It is, perhaps, one of the great mysteries of the world. No, I’m not talking about Donald Trump’s hair or Miley Cyrus’ belief that she is sexy. I’m talking about losing streaks in betting.

    All of us except those who sell “locks of the week” (those guys are the best handicappers in the whole wide world) have experienced them: prolonged periods of loser after loser — like speed dating at a Star Trek convention.

    I would like to say that handicappers can control these series of unfortunate events, but, sadly, racetrack gamblers in particular must simply learn to minimize the pain… or risk being consumed by it. 

    Racing is not sports betting. In a typical point-spread play, a bettor has a 50 percent chance of winning and a 50 percent chance of losing, with the house keeping a 9.1 percent vigorish for facilitating the play. 

    In pari-mutuel  wagering, there is almost always more than two betting options — except in off-the-turf events at Aqueduct and Parx — and the”vig”, or takeout, is in the 17-20 percent range on straight (win, place, show) wagers and in the 20-30 percent range on exotic bets. Hence, a bettor’s success rate and winning payoff are both negatively affected. 

    What this means, of course, is a greater probability of long losing streaks — even if one’s overall winning percentage is relatively high.

    Take, for example, my own spot plays in the latter half of November. From Nov. 16-30, I offered my best method and angle picks to those who purchased one of the report packages offered at my Web site and, all in all, it was a successful promotion.     

    During the two weeks, I had 67 total plays, of which 48 met my fair odds (when stipulated). The results are below:

    All Selections: 67
    Winners: 30
    Win Rate: 44.8%
    Return: $151.10
    ROI: +12.76%

    Qualified Selections: 48
    Winners: 20
    Win Rate: 41.7%
    Return: $115.60
    ROI: +20.42%

    Click HERE to see a day-by-day listing of all the selections.

    Pretty good, huh? Well check out these “lowlights” and, remember, we’re talking about positive overall stats and a mere two-week period in which the plays were offered:

    * One winner and a -83 percent ROI in my first 10 qualified picks (the selections were listed by track — in alphabetical, followed by race, order).

    * After a great day on Nov. 23 (3-of-4, +127.5 percent ROI), I went 1-for-10, with a teeth-grinding five second-place finishes over the next six days.

    So, in 14 days — 14 days! — I experienced two 1-for-10 skeins, despite a 41.7 percent winning average on the whole.

    And you want to know something really amazing (if you don’t, please just play along)? These results practically mirrored another two-week promotion I did in September.

    Take a look at the digits:

    All Selections: 83
    Winners: 37
    Win Rate: 44.6%
    Return: $183.20
    ROI: +10.36%

    Note: There was one off-the-turf race which did not count in the totals.

    Qualified Selections: 56
    Winners: 23
    Win Rate: 41.1%
    Return: $136.60
    ROI: +21.96%

    Click HERE to see a day-by-day listing of all the selections.

    Once again, I present the “lowlights:”

    * Starting with the 8th race at Assiniboia Downs on Sept. 22 through Sept. 27, I cashed once in 18 bets (on contenders that met or exceeded my fair odds).

    * Minus Saturday, Sept. 28, my win rate would have stood at 33 percent and my ROI would have checked in at a meager 1.67 percent.

    The point that I’m attempting to make here is that, even with a relatively healthy hit rate (41.3 percent among the two promotions), losing streaks are the norm, rather than the exception.

    This is true, perhaps to a lesser degree, in other sports as well. In the Denver Broncos first game of the season, Peyton Manning completed 27 of 42 pass attempts for 462 yards and an NFL record-tying seven touchdown passes. Yet, he started that game 1-for-4 and also had a 0-for-4 streak and a stretch where he was just 2-of-7… which brings me to part II of this treatise: the “gambler’s fallacy.”

    The gambler’s fallacy is the belief among some bettors that their odds of winning go up with each successive loss. This is sometimes called the “Monte Carlo fallacy” based on an incident that occurred at the Monte Carlo Casino.

    The story goes that on August 18, 1913, at a roulette wheel inside the famous casino, the color black came up a record twenty-six times in a row. According to reports, the Casino made millions of francs that day as players doubled and tripled their stake on red at various points during the run — spurred on by the fallacious notion that it was “due.”

    To show the absurdity of this belief, I conducted a little test. I simulated 50,000 coin flips and recorded the results overall, as well as the results after five consecutive “tails” and 10 consecutive “tails.”

    The outcome of my experiment was as follows:

    TOTALS
    Heads: 25,038 (50.1%)
    Tails: 24,962 (49.9%)

    AFTER 5 CONSECUTIVE “TAILS”
    Heads: 797 (51.1%)
    Tails: 763 (48.9%)

    AFTER 10 CONSECUTIVE “TAILS”
    Heads: 22 (48.9%)
    Tails: 23 (51.1%)

    As you can see, there is simply nothing to the idea that one’s winning chances go up — or down, for that matter — based on previous results. Once an incident rate or success rate (whatever one wishes to call it) has been established, each event is independent of any preceding or proceeding event. In other words, the flip of a (fair) coin is always a 50-50 proposition.

    So what does all this teach us? Three things, I think:

    1) Racetrack gamblers should focus on managing, rather than eliminating, losing streaks.

    2) Each bet should be made independent of the last. In other words, no doubling up in the 8th race because your “sure thing” in the 7th lost its jockey at the gate. (Toward this end, it is wise to map out one’s wagers before the races.)

    3) Don’t play/pass races arbitrarily; either you have an edge or you don’t. And if you don’t know your edge, it’s safe to assume you don’t have one.

  • The Travers Travesty

    POSTED Sep 5, 2013 By Derek Simon
    The Daily Racing Form headline said it all: “Will Take Charge's jockey accused by rival trainer of using electrical device in Travers.”

     Great. The biggest race of the year at one of the most prestigious race meetings in the country — Saratoga — marred by accusations of cheating. Maybe next year Ryan Braun can give the call for “riders up.”

    “We have received a complaint that we are thoroughly investigating,” noted Lee Park, a spokesman for the New York Gaming Commission, “and we have sought the assistance of the New York State Police, which has expertise in video analysis…. I cannot confirm what came with the complaint. However, I can confirm … that we do have more than one video of the race that’s being reviewed.”

    Of course, there’s little doubt where the complaint came from. Eric Guillot, trainer of the second-place finisher Moreno, was hardly coy in his assessment of how Will Take Charge managed to defeat his sophomore star.

    “To me, the horse was dead in the water four jumps out from the wire when he hit him with the machine, he surged,” Guillot told The Daily Racing Form. “Pretty suspicious why they had a jock change coming off a second place in the Jim Dandy.”

    Guillot was referring to the fact that 21-year-old Luis Saez replaced Junior Alvarado as the rider of Will Take Charge after the Jim Dandy, a traditional prep for the Travers, also run at Saratoga.

    I know what some of you are thinking: Who cares what Guillot thinks? The guy is his own reality TV show, one Fruit Loop short of a box; he makes Amanda Bynes appear rational.

    True, but in this instance, he seems sincere, at least to me.

    “One thing I have with all the [stuff] I talk is integrity,” Guillot said. “Integrity goes a long way with me. This industry needs it. This will be a black eye to the industry. But I think if we all clean up the rats and flush them out, we’ll have no more problems in the future. I feel sorry for the industry and the gamblers, the people that bet on him at 30-1, for it to come to this.”

    In any event, I thought Guillot’s claims were worthy of my own investigation, so I analyzed the race replay on TwinSpires.com looking for clues of a conspiracy.

    Sadly, I found more than that — much more. In fact, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that what I discovered from the videotape and still photos that I scrutinized has implications far beyond racing.

    I know a picture is worth a thousand words, so I produced a video detailing my findings (below). After you watch it, I’m confident that you will be convinced — as I was — that what occurred at Saratoga racecourse on Aug. 24, 2013, can never be allowed to happen again.

    I can only hope that the principals involved will be dealt with and that this sport — a sport that I dearly love — can move forward in the aftermath of this insidious event.

    Note: The views expressed in this video may or may not be — but definitely aren't — true. Some names have been changed to protect the sane.

    FREE Weekend Handicapping Reports

    Coming soon.

  • The Truth About the Pick Three

    POSTED Aug 30, 2013 By Derek Simon
    At one time, the goal of most racetrack gamblers — if they had a goal at all — was to pick winners. Read any handicapping book published before Al Gore invented the Internet (when a “cell phone” was still a phone used by prison inmates) and you’ll see what I mean.

    In the original “Betting Thoroughbreds,” for example, Steve Davidowitz discusses Beyer speed figures — then produced by the man himself and not the Daily Racing Form — by relating how they affected his success rate.

    “In the first season, the results said 176 winners in 310 picks. Fifty-three percent,” Davidowitz wrote. “A flat bet profit in all categories.”

    Nowhere in his book does Davidowitz mention what that flat-bet profit, or return on investment (ROI), was. That’s because, back then, it didn’t matter. The assumption was that if one could “out-pick” the crowd, one would win.

    Two decades later, Andrew Beyer realized how wrong this premise had been.

    “At Gulfstream Park in 1990, all of my worst fears about the nature of the pari-mutuel competition materialized,” the dean of speed-figure handicapping wrote. “My speed figures — which had now advanced into the computer age — had never been so refined. I was watching races, assessing individual horses’ efforts, and detecting track biases more astutely than ever before. I was handling my money and my emotions with skill and maturity — a great step forward from the time I punched a hole through the wall of Gulfstream’s press box in a rage over an unjust disqualification. I felt that I was at the very top of my game as a gambler. And still I couldn’t win. My lack of success was due not to bad luck or photo finishes or any of the other traumas that plague all horseplayers. My frustration was best demonstrated by some of the winners I picked — by horses like Memorable Skier.”

    Beyer went on to say that Memorable Skier had finished out of the money (worse than third) in all of his nine career races against maiden competition and was now facing winners, which, under normal circumstances, would make the horse an instant toss for most handicappers.

    “But his speed figures were competitive and, in his last start, [Memorable Skier] had been forced to race wide on a track with a strong rail-favoring bias,” Beyer explained. “Now he was running again on a day when the rail was an advantage, and he had drawn post position 5, with four slow-breaking horses inside him. I concluded that the maiden would be able to drop to the rail and lead all the way. When I went to the track that day, prepared to make a killing, I thought Memorable Skier embodied all of the handicapping skills I had spent a lifetime learning.

    “The race went just as I expected,” Beyer went on. “Memorable Skier popped out of the gate, angled to the rail, led all the way to win by six lengths — and paid $6.20. A pitiful $6.20.

    “Even at a track heavily populated by tourists and retirees, the betting public had become smart and well-informed,” Beyer concluded.

    While I don’t necessarily believe that the crowd had suddenly become “smart and well-informed” (I think that was always the case to a certain degree), it is noteworthy that Beyer was complaining about Memorable Skier’s price after the race had been run (and he had presumably bet). Outside of his reference to making “a killing,” he gave no indication as what his expectations were before the race.

    Fast forward another 20 years and little has changed in the minds of some handicappers. Despite declining field sizes, arguably fewer quality races, drugs (both legal and illegal) and a host of other new variables to muddle the handicapping picture, many folks analyze races today like they did when Sheena Easton won a Grammy for Best New Artist — they focus entirely on picking the winner.

    Of course, many realize, as Beyer did, that prices are not what they once were on standout horses, particularly those with a speed or class edge. Enter the horizontal wager: the pick-3, pick-4, pick-5 and pick-6.

    Because these types of bets focus almost entirely on picking the race winner, bettors flock to them like foam fingers to Miley Cyrus. But are these kinds of bets such a great deal? Personally, I have my doubts, so I decided to conduct a little test.

    I looked at my database stats for Saratoga during the first week of August in an effort to determine whether or not pick-3 wagering, in particular, made more sense (and more dollars, for that matter) than straight win betting.

    First, because so many pick-three bettors are looking to beat the favorite in one or more of the legs, I checked to see how the post-time favorite in pick-3 sequences fared over the studied period (Aug. 1-5):
    Favorites: 49
    Winners: 12
    Win Rate: 24.5%
    ROI: -36.43%
    Next, I determined what the average $2 pick-3 returned:
    Avg. Pick-3 Payoff (46 sequences): $353.78
    Then, I computed what a simple $2 parlay on the same races would have produced:
    Avg. Three-Race Parlay (46 sequences, same races as above): $295.90
    “Ah-ha,” I can hear some of you exclaim. “You see, you see (you’re a very excitable lot), the pick-3 offers better value than a parlay” (which is typically the argument for pick-3 wagering).

    OK, that’s true; has been for many years. This is due to the fact that the pick-3 pool extracts takeout and breakage, albeit at a higher rate, just once, whereas each race in a three-race parlay is subject to the track and government’s wrath.

    What this viewpoint ignores is something that economists refer to as “opportunity costs,” or the foregone benefits of other options. And I would argue that those benefits, in many cases, are better than those offered by the pick-three.

    Permit me to explain: Let’s say that you like Horse A, at, say, 4-5 odds, in a particular race. But because of the short price, you decide to bet a pick-3 singling Horse A in the opening leg. Assuming that Horse A wins, what kind of a return do you need to beat the resulting $3.60 payoff?

    Many of you will say $3.61… and many of you would be wrong. A $3.61 payoff assumes a single $2 bet and a 100 percent strike rate in each of the two remaining legs of the pick-3… which could only be guaranteed if one were to cover all the possible combinations.

    So, for the sake of argument, let’s pretend there are eight horses in each of the last two legs of our mythical pick-3. Assuming that we hit the “ALL” button, our ticket cost now stands at $128 ($2 x 1 x 8 x 8). Hence, we would need a pick-3 payoff of $230.40 to match (not exceed) what a corresponding $128 win bet on Horse A would have returned.

    This is not good news considering that the three pick-3’s in my study that led off with an odds-on winner returned an average of $166.47. Granted, a three-race sample is hardly proof of concept, but it’s not encouraging either.

    “But Derek,” I hear some of you complaining, “nobody hits the ‘ALL’ button on two legs, especially with a big favorite leading off.”
    A valid point, but keep in mind: The minute one starts limiting the pick-3 combinations, one’s winning percentage goes down. So what started as a high percentage play on a 4-5 shot now becomes a much lower-percentage one.

    And that uncertainty must be taken into account if one is playing for profit and not just the gratification of having a winning ticket.

    Are You Ready For Some Football?

    With the kickoff of the NFL season on Thursday, I thought I would re-post a video I did for Youbet.com a few years ago.