Page 4 - December 2006 The Game

4 The Game, December 2006 Canada’s Thoroughbred Racing Newspaper The Game Names a New Editor – And it’s Me!
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By
(Newly Named Editor) Peter Gross
Betting-wise, this was a very good year at the track for me. I hit countless daily doubles, a whack of exactors and
pick-threes, and I even cashed my first superfecta. But the most exciting thing to happen to me at the racetrack in 2006 was a phone call I received just before the first race on a crisp Saturday in early October. It was Stacie Roberts, owner/publisher of The Game.
“Are you interested in being Editor of The Game?” she asked.
Interested? Does a horse have four legs? Was Sandy Hawley a jockey? Could Northern Dancer pass it on? Much as I like to play hard to get, I said yes immediately.
This is all a little unusual, because Stacie is asking me to replace her as editor; I’m trying to remember a situation in pro sport where the incumbent coach selected his own replacement. Stacie emphasized that she wants The Game to move forward and the selection of a new editor is one of many initiatives that will be taken to heighten awareness of this paper across Canada. To free herself to deal fulltime with the business side, Stacie needed someone to take over editorial.
I was told that the new Editor of The Game needs to be able to burst from the gate, sustain a long persistent drive down the backstretch, not lose stride in the turns, carry his speed through the final furlong, persist with courage right to the wire and be able to do this while not filling the pages with excessive metaphors.
Stacie says I’m the guy.
In an industry that is far from fertile for niche publications, this woman has done something quite remarkable with The Game: She’s made it a success. It has come out like clockwork on the first Friday of every month for close to six years. And, without revealing too much of her accountant’s business, The Game makes money.
So why is Stacie replacing herself as Editor? Well, she wants to be able to focus on the advertising and, besides, I was inundating her with story ideas every month. Maybe, she figures, this way I’ll be less annoying.
How will The Game be different with my fingerprints on it? If I had to describe myself, I’d say I was a writer, a gambler and a smartass, not necessarily in that order. If The Game reflects my personality, it will become a little edgier, a little funnier and it will embrace the fact that horseracing is driven by wagering.
I have no intention of turning this paper into a tip sheet or betting bible, but I’ve always felt The Game could use more reference to win, place and show.
With that in mind, starting this month, I will be contributing a column titled Handicapping 101. (Those of you who have attended the races with me can skip this column because it will simply be a regurgitation of the endless concepts I spout when I’m playing the ponies.)
Aside from that, I plan no major changes. The Game is already a treat to read every month. There’s a saying in the broadcast/publishing business that every story is about somebody and Stacie has consciously filled her paper with the adventures of real people. In the last year, for example, we ran items on owners, trainers, jockeys, bugs, grooms, hotwalk- ers, race callers, and breeders. There was a story on a backstretch artist, a veterinarian, a equine acupuncturist, a far- rier and Gertrude Stevenson who was still playing the races at the age of 105. I don’t think I will ever tire of hearing from old-timers like Lloyd Jones with intriguing tales of Old Woodbine, Thorncliffe and Dufferin Park.
If The Game is to become even better, it must reflect the experiences of the people who read it. I want to encourage anyone who thinks they have an interest- ing story or a critical comment to contact us. We’re at info@thehorsegame.com. If you contact us, I promise we will respond.
The really good news, well for me at least, is that now I have a full time job that requires me to be at the track several times a week.
Does it get any better than this?
Handicapping 101
By Peter Gross
How often do horses repeat their wins? Well, if you have nothing but time on your hands and no appreciable personal life, you might want to do what I did one Sunday afternoon. I went through an entire Daily Racing Form and made a notation every time I saw a win in a horse’s chart. I came up with some very interesting statistics. In that particular Racing Form, there were 765 instances where a horse won a race. The horse repeated the win, 240 times. From that sampling, 31% of horses repeated their wins.
I should tell you that the form I used for this research was from Breeders’ Cup day. The horses assembled at Churchill Downs that Saturday had doubled up on victory 178 times out of 431 chances – that’s better than 45% - not surprising since this was an assemblage of the best horses in the world. By removing the Churchill figures, I got 62 horses repeating wins from 334 chances or about 18.5%.
So, on a typical day at the track, a horse that is coming off a win has a one in five chance of winning again. You can use this figure to your advantage. Many favourites are horses that have just won. The bettors see this and assume it will happen again. The math says it won’t.
If you see a heavily bet horse that is attempting to win for the second straight time, toss it. Four out of five times, you’ll be right.
In fact, the one overwhelming factor that most race
winners have in common is that they lost their last race. This may seem to spit in the face of logic, but your best bet for a winner is a horse that did not win last time out.
There are so many factors that contribute to a victorious horse – the weather, the track condition, the post position, the horse’s mood and physical well-being, the jockey, the nature and behaviour of the other horses, the length of the race, equipment, lasix, bute, etc. When a horse wins, there has been a harmonic convergence of many things that is probably unlikely to occur the next time.
Now, even though I have chosen to exclude the figures gleaned from the Breeders’ Cup horses, it’s very worthwhile to consider what happened on November 4. Through the eight B.C. Championship races, there were 40 horses looking to repeat their wins. Only two of them (Dreaming of Anna and Invasor) were able to do it.
In the Sprint, if you’d been crazy enough to throw out the seven horses who had won their last races and boxed the remaining seven speedballs in $2 exactors, you would have spent $84, but you would have hit the 1-2 exactor that returned $955.40.
If you think that’s wild, consider this: If you had bet $2 win/place on every horse on the Breeders’ Cup card that had not won its previous race, it would have cost you $252, which, of course, is a bizarre and ridiculous amount to bet on horses that had all come in off losing efforts.
But if you had done that, you would have cashed $337.70.
Did You Know....
That ESPN plans to cross-promote horse racing with Monday Night Football in their ongoing commitment to horse racing. The 2007 G2 Meadowlands Breeders Cup Stakes on espn2 will
be broadcast during half time of its ESPN Monday Night foot- ball game.
2006 is the first year that ESPN will be broadcasting Monday Night Football and it is also the first year that they will be broadcasting the Breeders’ Cup scheduled for November.