Case Study for Textbook on Sheet Reading

[SoCalMan2]

Just decided to write a case study for a sheet reading text book and thought people might be interested.  If you are offended by redboarding or otherwise not interested, stop here.  

In general, the term \'0-2-X\' gets thrown around a lot, but not a lot of people pay close attention to the significance of it. The 3 y.o. filly, Western Sweep, entered on June 1, 2007 in \"The Touch of Love\" stakes provided a text book example of why this angle can be so valuable.

Handicappers who believe in this angle look at it as an opportunity to toss an overbet horse (i.e. a horse who has run the 0-2 and is being bet off those two strong races allows the wiseguy to comfortably bet against the horse because of the impending/pre-ordained X). This is not the purist way to view 0-2-X.  While everybody loves to throw out heavily bet horses, dogmatic approaches to 0-2 are not the right basis to do so.  In general, if a horse is tossable regardless of the 0-2, it should be tossed.  If in doubt, the fact that the horse is sitting on a 0-2 should not be the deciding factor rather than an evaluation taking into consideration the totality of circumstances.

The real value in 0-2-X is that it can give you a horse to focus on at a good price.  Usually, the price is produced because the X doesn\'t look so good, and the O-2 may be isolated good races for a horse who generally does not look so strong (in my experience 0-2-X is usually more effective if the \'0\' is a new top significantly better than the horse\'s prior top).

Of course not all \'0-2\'s do turn into \'0-2-X\'s so there are even less 0-2-X opportunities than there are 0-2 opportunities.  However, when a 0-2-X materializes, the idea runs that a horse can come back after the X to the top or even make a new top, and if that makes the horse look good in this race and the odds are right, voila you have a good opportunity.

If you look at Western Sweep\'s sheet (available today in the redboard room on this site), you will see a sheet loaded with valuable sheet reading lessons.  But, it was 0-2-X that made you have to think that Western Sweep looked very strong.  The fact that she was 20-1 in a 7 horse field was magic icing.  While she ended up losing by a head to a filly she spotted considerable ground to on the turn, there is no question she ran the best fig and if she had saved a very modest amount of ground (like it looked like she could off the PPs) she would have won.  While a person betting on her would not have been rewarded with a fat win payoff, the 13.80 to place in a 7 horse field is not bad and she was part of a $214 exacta and $1490 trifecta that were haveable if you keyed her and extremely generous given it was only a 7 horse race.

So, to run through her sheet -- as a two year old, she runs a top of 13 and then takes 5 months off.  She comes back as a three year old two ticks off her two year old top.  In her second race back, she precisely matches her two year old top.  In her third race back, she was sitting on two prominent handicapping angles.  First, she was third race back which is often when a horse who has not fired their best will do so (look at Street Sense in the Derby as a recent example).  Second, there is a well known angle that when a three year old matches its two year old top, that is a tip off that the horse is ready to make a big jump forward.  Clearly, those two angles were working as Western Sweep\'s third race back produced the \'0\' of this 0-2-X case study.

That \'7.75\' top was clearly isolated (a major jump forward from the pre-established level of 13).  It would not have been a surprise to see a major bounce next out.  What we got instead was only a modest bounce -- the \'2\' of the 0-2-X. The other good thing about that \'2\' is that it was somewhat buried in that she lost the race by almost 10 lengths (finishing 5th).

Next came the \'X\'.    The good news for this example is that she was 24-1 that day and lost convincingly to two horses that she would meet again in the Touch of Love.  

Now we come to the race in question.  She presents a classic 0-2-X pattern.  Prior to the pattern, she ran in 4 consecutive claiming races, but only won one of them.  In stakes company, bettors tend to be irrationally prejudiced against horses who are \'former claimers\' -- Shifty Sheik, Kings Swan, Charismatic, and Seabiscuit notwithstanding -- and that prejudice can produce nice prices for speed figure players.  Her \'O\' is in a NW1X and is somewhat buried in that it produced a low Beyer.  As explained above, the \'2\' was also buried and the \'X\' had the virtue of also being a convincing loss to two of today\'s competitors.

In terms of her competitors, we had the beauty of the fact that her \'0\' made her the second fastest filly in the field.  Strangely, the filly with the fastest figure was the 31-1 outsider who filled out the $1490 trifecta.  This oddly named filly (especially in light of the OJ case) -- Nordberg -- had to be included in tickets because how often is the fastest horse in the field the rank outsider in the betting?  In terms of the two fillies who had previously beaten Western Sweep, they had tops slower than Western Sweep\'s \'0\' and were the favorite and second choice.  The race was very competitive and the favorite particularly (the second choice less so) were clearly overbet.  A repeat of Western Sweep\'s \'O\' figured to be good enough to win and there was the chance that Western Sweep would improve to faster than the \'0\'.  

As mentioned, the race was extremely competitive, but there were good reasons to include the eventual winner-- Silvercup Baby. She was a three year old whose last race was a return to her two year old top (a two point jump was not unreasonable to forecast and would put her in the thick of things), there were reasons to think she could get the lead by herself, she was 8-1, and, despite coming back off a long break, she had worked sharply coming into the race including a bullet work handily a week before.

Of course, the key is on how to bet, and this handicapper flubbed this particular question on the day in question.  In retrospect, a win and place bet on her would have generated profit ($4 would have returned $13.80).  A backwards and forwards exacta wheel would have cost $24 and would have paid $214 and a trifecta wheel in first and second positions would have cost $60 and returned $1490.  These may not have been cleverly devised betting strategies, but they would have turned profit (and as mentioned, there was reason to think good prices could run with her because the race was very competitive).

[TGJB]

Yeah, that was a bad photo for me too. Not as bad as the one a few minutes later with the 39-1 shot at CD I keyed that lost second by a nose, but bad enough.

[BitPlayer]

SCM2 -

Interesting post.  Do you think the power of 0-2-X derives primarily from the likelihood of a return to (or improvement on) the top or from the likelihood that the horse will be overlooked in the wagering?

The ThoroPattern data I looked at a little over a year ago indicated that Top-Off-X pattern produced a Pair or better next out a little under 30% of the time for 3 and 4yos.  [It was not nearly as strong for older horses; closer to 15%.] Top-Pair-X was slightly better at around 35%, and I guess you\'d expect 0-2-X to fall somewhere between the two.  There are lots of stronger patterns, but those seem less likely to be underestimated by the betting public.

I think confidence in the TG data may also be critical to the angle.  When I look at speed figures from other sources and find a horse who has spiked a top and then fallen off, my first inclination is to question whether the isolated figure is accurate.  TG\'s methodology seems like it tends to produce smoother lines, so that dramatic new tops are more likely to reflect improved performance than figuremaking error.

[SoCalMan2]

Dear Bitplayer,

Very good question and excellent points.  I wish I could tell you that I know, but I would be lying.  

On your question, the only way I can think of answering is to say it would be a combination of the two and that is a pure guess.  It seems to me that an isolated top can often be ignored because it is an outlier.  However, an isolated top followed by another very good effort but only slightly off suggests the horse has reached a new level of speed and that new level needs to be given a lot more credence than the horse\'s prior racing record (this is especially the case in young three year olds).  The \'X\' may be nothing more than a temporary reaction which is more forgivable because the horse had two good efforts.  That is all, of course, coupled with how the horse looks to the betting population in general....to them the \'0\' was two races back and could have been an outlier if it looked good.  The X of course looks no good and a lot of times, the \'2\' does not look so good to them (it is after all worse than the \'0\').  The other thing is that since the \'0\' is now the 3rd race back in the PPs, it starts to look like old history and no different to the form handicapper than the racing history that preceded it whereas a sheet reader may say, this is a special occasion where you can forget the prior history and only look at the last three races.  Again, what I am saying here could all be hocum.  It is a good question that deserves consideration, but I suspect there are people here more adept at answering than me (TGJB for sure).

One final note -- I feel like a complete idiot.  I wrote that message on Saturday morning.  Of course, the ROTW that very afternoon ended up featuring a 0-2-X that won the ROTW at a $51 mutuel.  It is classic karma. My post should have pointed that horse out clearly. Did I cash a ticket?  No!!  I inexplicably just decided that a 7 horse field at Thistledown was of no interest to me (I hate short fields and especially when the rake is terrible -- 22% on exactas in a 7 horse field is downright larceny).  In retrospect it is clear that being able to toss an odds on favorite can make betting into the teeth of such a take possible on special occasions.  Need to remember that there are almost no categorical principles.