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What has happened to this forum? Even Bill Wynne is showing up. Horse
racing is fun but you can't place your bet in the "last furlong" so I prefer
the market.
Good to "see" you all. Now, if we could only get Mark to punch PO's buttons
that would be fun.
Best regards,
~Bob
----- Original Message -----
From: <tradewynne@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <omega-list@xxxxxxxxxx>; "Alex Matulich" <alex@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, June 11, 2009 9:07 AM
Subject: Re: Horse Betting
I used to hang out in San Diego, surf in the morning,
then scan the DRF over coffee and breakfast, and then
hit the track at Del Mar. We would pay for the cheap
seats and then sneak into the fancy hat section.
As Borat say: "Very Nice!"
Anyway my "system" was looking in the DRF for workout
times on longer shots (8-1 +) that were faster or equal
to the favorites. Usually bet them to place or show.
Occasionally I bet them to win (say 50-1 odds AND the
workouts were as good as the favorite). I also favored
the better jockeys. I actually hit some of these 50-1
shots and made consistent money over all (I took something
home on over half the races I bet).
It is like trading. You don't have to an insider, but
you need to know a niche better than most. And you need to
be consistent in your method. It's easy to get carried away
after hitting a 50-1 shot. You have to be boringly methodical.
That said, even in retrospect, I could not see Mine That
Bird coming. The Mine That Bird story is really one for
the ages.
--- On Wed, 6/10/09, Alex Matulich <alex@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
From: Alex Matulich <alex@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: Horse Betting
To: omega-list@xxxxxxxxxx
Date: Wednesday, June 10, 2009, 11:48 AM
Mark,
You may be interested in the following historical data I
collected,
painstakingly, 9 years ago. See the link below.
This is just one month's worth of Daily Racing Form
consensus and
race results data from September to October 2000, but that
one month
is still a pretty significant collection (nearly 6,000
races). It's
all in one big Excel spreadsheet, ready for you to analyze
and
number crunch any way you want.
This was a way for me to learn the Java programming
language, but
I also hoped to develop something profitable with the
results.
I wrote a program that downloaded the race schedules, the
DRF
consensus, betting info, and race results, automatically
every day,
parsed all those web pages, performed error checking to
discard
bad horse or race data (DRF pages do contain some errors),
and
combined the results in a spreadsheet. Writing the
software was a
lot of work (and I haven't used Java since!). I ran
this for DRF's
1-month free trial.
Unbelievable how many races happen in a month. There
are 5,780
data rows in the spreadsheet, one for each race. Each
row
contains:
Date
Track ID
Number of handicappers involved in the consensus scoring
Race number
Length of the race in yards
...plus for each of the top three scoring horses in the
consensus:
horse name
consensus score
pole position
morning line odds
win, place, and show payouts
I never managed to do anything useful with it. I
offer it to anyone
who might find it useful, and hope that if you do discover
something
from this data, that you will share it with me.
You can download the spreadsheet from
http://unicorn.us.com/alex/drfconsensus.zip (430K
zipped, 1.7M unzipped)
I hope somebody finds it useful. And before anyone
asks, I don't
think I have all the software modules anymore. I've
changed
computers 5 times since then. I do have all the
original web pages
that the data came from, though.
-Alex
P.S. The above message is a copy of a usenet post from
2003:
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.sport.horse-racing.systems/msg/b5fe59c2f9d73fc1
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