Thehoarsehorseplayer Wrote:
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> 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.)

This point above looks interesting, but I am not sure I follow -- are you saying that since the guy rated the two horses in the same ball park and one got crushed and the other didn't that makes the one that didn't get crushed represent value? In theory, they are supposed to be the same price because of the crowd's opinion, not because of their ability. To be honest, I am a little lost here.


>
> 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?


If the horse was listed as 20-1 and went off at 20-1, that line was good whether or not the horse won. How the horse performs has nothing to do with whether or not the line was good. The starting gate can malfunction and the race declared a no contest and you still had all the information you needed to know about whether the line was any good. 20-1 shots are supposed to win sometimes.

If the line were made by a reliable line maker, then the horse getting bet down would be valuable information. However, when the linemaker is not reliable, then you cannot judge that off his/her line and you need to make your own ML. Note, no linemaker will ever be perfect. That is by definition impossible. There is a tolerance for varying and being off (i would say even more so in 2yo maiden races). We are not talking about a line that is imperfect or off within acceptable tolerances. We are talking about lines that are missing the side of the barn. These lines are so far wide of the mark, they are not worth even bothering with.


>
> 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.

a horse that drops from 20-1 to 10-1 is not providing you any valuable information if the ML for the horse should have been 8-1. You have to know what a reliable ML would have been before you can judge whether there is any unexpected action on a horse.