HP: Go back if you would to our exchange of 3/11. The pt I raise re the Wired article is that conceptually, the handicapping approach of the HK teams is not all that different from what a select few among sheet players are already doing on their own. The biggest difference is that the sheet players are using figs & fig handicapping concepts instead of the 130 factors of some of the HK teams.

In the 3/11 post you confirmed that, like me, you take into consideration certain factors in the context of a specific race to make a judgment re whether each horse is an overlay to go fwd, bkwds, or remain the same. As I understand it, that's what the cutting edge players are doing as well, except they are not content to do a rough calculation in their head.

The programs they use start with a judgment regarding each horse's stage of development & approx. % chance of improving, pairing, and/or running a gd no. in relation to the horse's effective top. This info, along with the effective top itself, the horse's weight(don't even think of going there), & the horse's post position are used in a large no. simulation to determine how many times each horse would win if the race was run, say, 20k times, which is then used to calc a true odds line.

A major advantage of this approach is that it forces you to make decisions which should be made in evey race. It also allows you to take advantage of a database which even the most experienced player cannot match, while getting the benefit of the "law of large nos." Pretty damn clever, if you ask me.