So nobody commented on "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers", either because they recognized it, or because they didn't. I'm going to choose the latter, because I feel like it.

The quote is from the greatest locker room speech of all time, or Shakespeare's version of it-- the St. Crispian's day speech of Henry V (Prince Hal all grown up), before the battle of Agincort. The British, badly outnumbered by at least 5-1, depending on the source, destroyed the French, in part because the French were, well, French-- they spent the night before the battle partying, and their unprofessional army fought with a complete lack of discipline. They also were in heavy armor, while Henry had a light, disciplined group of professional fighters.

But the British had something else-- they had perfected the longbow, while the French had crossbows, and cannon that could not be brought up to the bottlenecked front. Henry's archers had specialty arrows, too-- some had heads designed to pierce armor-- and they set up 300 yards out and cut loose. By the time the dust settled, the British had suffered a few hundred casualties, the French around 10,000.

Anyway-- as noted here recently, an astounding 28 TG on-line account holders qualified for the NTRA contest, 25 of whom used our data in it, and six of those finished in the top 20. At this past week's World Series of Handicapping you didn't have to qualify, so just short of 800 players participated, of which around 3% (the happy few) were our guys. Well, they haven't released the names of all those who earned checks yet, but we do know about the top eleven (only because two of our guys finished in a dead heat for tenth). There were FOUR who used Thoro-Graph in that group.

Thoro-Graph. The longbow of handicapping.



TGJB