Belmont All Stakes Analysis

[hellersorr]

Polish Numbers on the bottom doesn\'t exactly scream 12 furlongs but IWC did wallop the rest of the field.

[boardedup]

TAP at 5 weeks, another impressive Belmont, another notch on the belt.  His were about the only two still trying at the end of the main event today.

Overall great card, great day.  The \"big names\" showed out start to finish with enough prices mixed in to keep everything moving.  This day continues to live up to the hype, as good as it gets really.

[jerry]

The payoffs are a little light.

[boardedup]

What do you mean?  To much rake overall? Or are you referring solely to the Belmont Stakes?  What was short?  The multi race plays?

Day started out going Baffert-Brown-TAP in the Easy goer and it still seemed to pay \"ok\" despite of that.  You had War Story pay $10, Disco Partner paid $11.60,and the Woodford winner (Ascend given out in TG analysis) brought back $57 and a ~$250 exacta w the 6/5 Fav rounding it out..
    The exotics in the Woody Stephens seemed more than straight considering the heavily favored AA romped.  Despite Baffert winning 4 races (w 4 favs) and the top two betting choices making up the exacta in the Belmont everything seemed to come back decent?

 I didn\'t notice anything that looked egregious?  I\'m not great with these things though, I suck at math.

[hellersorr]

Speaking of payoffs, in the Belmont the exacta of 5-2 over 5-1 was paying $38.20, while the opposite paid $45.20, only seven dollars more.  Don\'t see that very often.

(Unless, of course, I\'m completely and totally wrong about those payoffs - always a possibility.)

[P-Dub]

boardedup Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> What do you mean?  To much rake overall? Or are
> you referring solely to the Belmont Stakes?  What
> was short?  The multi race plays?
>
> Day started out going Baffert-Brown-TAP in the
> Easy goer and it still seemed to pay \"ok\" despite
> of that.  You had War Story pay $10, Disco Partner
> paid $11.60,and the Woodford winner(Ascend given
> out in TG analysis) brought back $57 and a ~$250
> exacta w the 6/5 Fav rounding it out..
>     The exotics in the Woody Stephens seemed more
> than straight considering the heavily favored AA
> romped.  Despite Baffert winning 4 races (w 4
> favs) and the top two betting choices making up
> the exacta in the Belmont everything seemed to
> come back decent?
>
>  I didn\'t notice anything that looked egregious?
> I\'m not great with these things though, I suck at
> math.

Ascend was given out a part of a 4 horse box and the other 3 were the horses to double up on. I wouldn\'t say he was \"given out\" for any win wager, and of the 4 horses listed he was the slowest.

Now, based on the tote if you wanted to bet the longest price you were rewarded.

[hellersorr]

As Terry Bjork of The Derby List was fond of noting: \"After every race some guy jumps up and says \'The sheets had it!\'\"

[hellersorr]

And this article explains part of the reason why.

https://www.paulickreport.com/horseplayers-category/thoroughbred-owner-faron-mccubbins-nails-belmont-stakes-challenge/

[boardedup]

That\'s fair, the horse was listed below the other 3 in the analysis, I guess it\'s all how you interpret information.  Like you said, if a horse is mentioned as playable in tri boxes and you see him at 27-1, it\'s up to your individual handicapping as to whether you take the leap of faith and bet him individually or not.  

I can say for me personally I doubt he would have been high on my radar otherwise, but you\'re totally correct, the analysis did not say to bet him to win or across the board or anything like that.  

My tickets are basically never a carbon copy of the analysis given though, it helps confirm or dismiss possible plays and  more so acts as a starting point for betting a race.  I\'d have to think that\'s pretty much par for the course around here though.

[P-Dub]

boardedup Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> That\'s fair, the horse was listed below the other
> 3 in the analysis, I guess it\'s all how you
> interpret information.  Like you said, if a horse
> is mentioned as playable in tri boxes and you see
> him at 27-1, it\'s up to your individual
> handicapping as to whether you take the leap of
> faith and bet him individually or not.  
>
> I can say for me personally I doubt he would have
> been high on my radar otherwise, but you\'re
> totally correct, the analysis did not say to bet
> him to win or across the board or anything like
> that.  
>
> My tickets are basically never a carbon copy of
> the analysis given though, it helps confirm or
> dismiss possible plays and  more so acts as a
> starting point for betting a race.  I\'d have to
> think that\'s pretty much par for the course around
> here though.

If the analysis has 4 horses listed in a box, basically saying none stand out, no problem with someone taking the longest price for a win wager.

[boardedup]

Something I like to do regularly honestly.  It happens more on big days when so many entered in any given stakes race can win (or appear so before the race).  When they\'re \"bunched\" together like this as a default I tend to bet the longest odds to Win or WP, and then mix in the others in exactas.

I\'m not sure if this is the \"best\" way to go about it or not?  The other side would say that if you don\'t have a strong enough opinion to distinguish between them, you should pass the race.  I look at it exactly opposite, if one\'s roughly just as likely to win as the others under consideration, but at higher odds, I\'m pressing this kind of spot pretty much every time.

 What do others think about this in general? Where do you draw the line between \"value\" and \"pissing in the wind?\"

(I have read the section on this site about why you bet a race)

[Furious Pete]

Value has nothing to do with price, only price relative to chances. You can find value in a 1.01 shot. There are people making a living from betting those 1.01 shots on Betfair, in-play betting, but of course they too get burned once in a while.

I think it was in Barry Meadows very mediocre book \"Money Secrets At The Racetrack\" I read a study suggesting something along the lines that the bigger the price, the less value one would get in average, suggesting that the general tendency in the betting public is to underestimate the favorites chances and overestimate the outsiders chances. Or maybe they\'re just greedy, I don\'t know.

This study was pretty old though and I don\'t know if it would hold up anymore, it feels like \"the sharks and syndicates\" are betting these favorites down more aggresively than before. Maybe Mathcapper have something on this?

Point is that there are no such rules and a suggested \"box\" in an analysis doesn\'t say anything about the chances they ascribe and certainly not anything about the \"real chances\" a horse would have to win, finish 2nd, etc. I think it\'s more likely that they \"throw\" a horse like Ascend in there not because they give him as big a chance as the others mentioned, but because they know he\'ll be a price and because they think his chances are better than that price suggest, i.e the \"value\"-concept is already built in to the analysis.

Now from there you could go on to make the point that you think one of the things TG does best is to identify those live longshots, and you could trust them to be able to identify value for you, but you won\'t know until you run a decent study on it and I really, really doub\'t that could beat the takeout. You have to identify the good spots from the bad spots, no matter which way you look at it.

And where\'s the fun in betting on another mans opinion, anyway?

[Mathcapper]

Furious Pete Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I think it was in Barry Meadows very mediocre book
> \"Money Secrets At The Racetrack\" I read a study
> suggesting something along the lines that the
> bigger the price, the less value one would get in
> average, suggesting that the general tendency in
> the betting public is to underestimate the
> favorites chances and overestimate the outsiders
> chances. Or maybe they\'re just greedy, I don\'t
> know.
>
> This study was pretty old though and I don\'t know
> if it would hold up anymore, it feels like \"the
> sharks and syndicates\" are betting these favorites
> down more aggresively than before. Maybe
> Mathcapper have something on this?

Pete â€"

The favorite-longshot bias (public tends to underbet favorites and overbet longshots) has been a well-known phenomenon for quite some time, perhaps not so much so in traditional handicapping literature (although I’m sure Barry Meadow was aware of it, whether or not he mentioned it in Money Secrets), but certainly in academia. There are a whole slew of papers on the subject collected in the 1994 anthology, Efficiency of Racetrack Betting Markets (re-released in 2008 to make It more accessible to laymen after Wall Street hedge funds quants bid the book up to over $1,000 a copy on Amazon). There are close to a dozen great papers on it in Part IV: Efficiency of Win Markets and the Favorite-Longshot Bias:

Efficiency of Racetrack Betting Markets (2008 Ed.)


As far as studies go, Steve Klein did the definitive study on the subject in The Power of Early Speed (2005), which I’ve posted about on a couple of occasions:

Re: Place Betting

On Line Travers Day Seminar


As I mentioned in those posts, you’re right, the computer guys have, for some time now, arbed most of that favorite bias away. Not only are favorites now paying less overall, but they’re winning at a higher rate as well.

How they’ve managed to do so is also detailed in the aforementioned EofRBM anthology. Essentially, guys like Bill Benter (see his report entitled, “Computer Based Horse Race Handicapping and Wagering Systems”, p. 183) have written extravagant computer programs that create their own probability lines (fair odds line) that have proven to reliably identify overlays, many of which were found among the top favorites due to the pronounced favorite-longshot bias that had been in existence.

They determine the extent of their overlays (“value”) just as you imply, by comparing their own probability lines (from their fair odds) to the public’s probability lines (tote odds), using the formula for expected value, which I’ve posted about before:

Is Kelly Dead?


Btw, for those that aren’t familiar with Barry Meadow’s Money Secrets at the Racetrack, the concept of creating a fair odds line to help ascertain one’s perceived value is the main focus of the book, along with tons of charts on the exotics showing the payoff you should expect for any given combination. Everyone’s entitled to their own opinion, but for my money, my dogged-eared copy of Money Secrets is one of the most important handicapping books I own, and one of the few that isn’t currently collecting dust. My only gripe is with the title itself, which sounds like something a shylark might have written to hock his latest can’t miss get-rich-quick scheme.

 
> Now from there you could go on to make the point
> that you think one of the things TG does best is
> to identify those live longshots, and you could
> trust them to be able to identify value for you,
> but you won\'t know until you run a decent study on
> it and I really, really doubt that could beat the
> takeout. You have to identify the good spots from
> the bad spots, no matter which way you look at it.

 
I\'ll have a lot more to say on this later, not so much on \"live longshots\", but on the concept of identifying value in general (\"good spots from bad spots\"), which is what the TG analyses (and of every handicapper who\'s worth his salt) is all about. I\'m working on just such a study now from the ROTW archives - hope to have something to share sometime before the opening of the spaaaa..


Rocky R

[Furious Pete]

Thank you Rocky, excellent and very informative post as always. I will re-visit those posts of yours and sources mentioned, and I might also give a 2nd look to Barry Meadows book. I think I might\'ve been a bit unfair on him there to call his book \"very mediocre\". There are some interesting parts for sure, all though I remember it now mostly as \"The Definitive Handbook on How To Be a Scrooge\".

Looking forward to read about your study!

[jerry]

Not saying anything smelled bad. Just saying overall, the day was a little boring. Other than the 10th, there weren\'t any obvious overlays. 2-1 shots in 1 & 2. The 3rd wasn\'t an automatic. 2-1 and even if the 4th and 5th. The 6th wasn\'t a big surprise but others in the same race wouldn\'t have been either. 2-1, 3-1 and 5-2 in the next three. The 10th was a moneymaker. Win and exacta both off TG. Wasn\'t about to take the two favs in the Belmont. Not at a mile and half. All in all, it was a tough day to come out ahead. I was glad I played golf.