Re: Saratoga Morning Line (1227 Views)
Posted by:
Thehoarsehorseplayer (IP Logged)
Date: August 04, 2016 12:25PM
Kurt Vonnegut warns us in Cat's Cradle, "Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way."
Anyway, for a variety of reasons I haven't been to a track for many years, (it's not the same game I fell in love with) but for twenty-five years of my life I was at one, or an OTB, every chance I got. And for most of those years, I tracked the odds of every horse in every race. Always what I was interested in was how the horses were bet in relationship to the morning line. It is my conviction that the butcher's thumb on the scale, if it exists in any race, is to be detected in the relationship between the morning odds and how a horse is bet. But I don't want to oversimplify the process. One cannot read an odds board well without having a keen understanding of past performances. And always one must distinguish between Veritas and verisimilitude. Nor can I encapsulate twenty-five years of experience into one posting. Still, this question needs to be asked, In the race under scrutiny the second place horse was listed at 15-1 and went off at 15-1. Was that a bad morning line? Or was the odds board telling you something? I mean, a 12-1 morning line got crushed in the pools, and the 15-1 never drifted? Might be a horse worth using in a horizontal. (No, I'm not redboarding. Just illuminating the process.)
I also noticed that on each of the first two days of the meet (maybe two out of the first three) a horse listed at 20-1 won at 20-1. Were these good or bad morning lines? And, since 20-1 morning lines generally drift higher, was the density of the betting maybe telling you something?
I guess I'll leave with this thought: A good lines maker should definitely be able to recognize the betting favorite. No excuse not to be able to do that 80% or more of the time. But on the other hand, most discrepancies in the morning line will be self-corrected in the pools, or better yet, to the astute observer, self-revealing.