Jay Cronley 9y

Analyzing the analysis

Horse Racing

Sometimes intangibles point a handicapper toward bets.

Not long ago I was watching an interview with a college basketball player who made close to a grammar mistake a sentence. It was like watching an original story on BBC when you had to scoot closer to the set and sound to try to sort the words out of the thick accents.

The player was a junior.

It is hugely ironic that the smart phone has dumbed down its users. There's no time to speak in complete sentences, him and me have to practice jump shots. Or is it me and him?

It wasn't the kid's fault.

But what kind of university would let one of its representatives obliterate the language on the national tube? Was the English department a false front?

Based on this intangible, I took the other team and collected on the investment.

The best inside information a handicapper can have is often gained through accessibility. Spouses could make a fortune handicapping.

It's why shows like "Hard Knocks" are more revealing than all the statistics in the world. I recall being taken inside the pre-season locker room of the Miami Dolphins and thinking the coach was too distant, and seeing Atlanta on "Knocks" another year and thinking the quarterback wasn't as good as the staff thought he was.

Horse stables are teams.

The best inside information sometimes comes from the way a trainer treats the public at early morning workouts, the way a groom dresses, the way a horse is handled in its stall. Rudeness is often a predictor of a bad performance.

Here's a relatively new intangible to the sports world -- the study of analytics.

It's how they'd pick horses on "The Big Bang Theory" before putting up two bucks.

Analytics is the search for meaningful patterns of data that would enable the handicapper to pick a winner without having to think too much. Link victories to weird stats and go collect. Horse players are fortunate to have the benefit of the best analytic possible, the Beyer number. Unfortunately data cannot project how the following elements will influence a horse race: moods, luck, karma, cheaters. If the same ten horses ran a race from the same ten post positions at the same race track in the same weather two weeks apart, the second race would probably produce scrambled results.

A horse race is a puzzle, a mystery, not a math problem. A correct analysis of the match-ups produces winners; if your luck holds.

In a 20-horse race like the Derby, a race in which a half-dozen of them could win, anybody can bet the top analytical, the top Beyer.

How do you handicap bad luck and bad karma?

You avoid those who court it.

The other day an analyst tried to bring money ball to hoops, using an analytic having to do with teams that make the most front ends of one-and-one free throws in the second halves. The team he touted was obliterated, the problem being, the dogs that helped boost the analytical insights were home playing video games, having been eliminated from competition much earlier.

Here are my two 2015 Derby throw-outs so far.

Horses liked by people looking for "value."

Horses liked by people deep into "analytics."

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