Furious Pete Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> With regards to "good spots and bad spots"; if one
> could find the situations were the formulas are
> underperforming and I'm sure there are flaws - one
> could even find situations better than before..?

> What do we actually know about what goes in to
> these formulas?

Pete --

I've talked a little bit about their flaws (a big one in Benter's original model that cost them their entire $100K+ initial bankroll) and the factors they use in some previous posts like this one:

[url=https://www.thorograph.com/phorum/read.php?1,99846,99888#msg-99888]Finley Article - TDN 030416[/url]


You'll read more about it in Benter's paper in EofRBM (pp.183-198). There was also a good article called "Horse Sense" in an actuarial trade magazine called Contingencies I've posted about:

[url=https://www.thorograph.com/phorum/read.php?1,86645,86677#msg-86677]Re: Pairs[/url]


But as Benter himself has said, the practitioners, including himself, are understandably reluctant to share much information about the composition of the actual individual factors.

There is one source where he did go into some detail about them though - in the talk he gave called "Advances in Mathematical Modeling of Horse Race Outcome Probabilities" at the 12th International Conference on Gambling & Risk-Taking, which is where most of my quotes from Benter are taken. Audio tapes of the conference sessions used to be available for a small fee on the conferecance website. Not sure if they are anymore, but if you're interested and can't find them, you can try contacting the Institute for the Study of Gambling & Commercial Gaming at UNR.

In any event, as I've discussed in another earlier post,

[url=https://www.thorograph.com/phorum/read.php?1,99481,99512#msg-99512]Re: ROW Pick 4[/url]

there's no magic to the probability estimates generated by the computer teams. As Benter notes, there is no single probability line (unless you are omniscient) that is the "true" probability line.

The objective is to create a probability line that is different from the public's, but also unbiased. When that line differs from the public's in your favor, and such horses are shown to reliably outperform the public's line, you've got a winning approach.

And that includes creating your own fair odds line by using things like Thoro-Graph performance figures, which to my knowledge are not part of the 80+ factors used in Benter's model or any others.

So one can certainly create a fair odds line that will be different not only from the public's, but also from the computer teams as well, and that will outperform either or both of those lines on occasion.

It's just a matter of reliably identifying when those situations arise. The probability lines of the computer teams are by no means flawless, nor are they the be-all and end-all of fair odds lines. They just do a very good job of identifying situations where their line is better than the public's, but there's more than one way to skin a cat (like using Thoro-graph figures, Maggie's physicality analysis, etc.). Ernie Dahlman made a pretty good career out of looking at [i]shoes[/i], with guys on the ground at each track, at a time when no one else was paying any attention to such a thing.



Rocky R