Latest Chips in Horse Racing Are in Computers

For most of my life as a horseplayer, I have started each day by picking the Daily Racing Form off the front stoop and poring over the data in its pages.

But in the past year, my routine has changed. Now, I start the day by sitting in front of a computer terminal and watching the data pass across the screen.

For American horseplayers, this is the dawning of the Age of Information. It has taken long enough--bettors have traditionally made their calculations with nothing more sophisticated than a red Flair pen--but computers are now becoming an important part of the handicapping process.

The Daily Racing Form abounds with ads for computer programs to aid horseplayers. Ponderous books have discussed the application of computer-generated data to handicapping. Laurel makes computers available to patrons in its Sports Palace. The Lexington, Ky.-based Handicappers’ Data Base permits computer subscribers to obtain exhaustive data on every racehorse, sire, dam, trainer and jockey in North America, as well as entries and results for tracks from coast to coast.

Even bettors who are resistant to the idea of using computers will have to deal with the machines eventually, because the very nature of the game will force it. The parimutuel system is a competition among bettors and, to win, a horseplayer has to know more than his competitors.

In the 1970s, an understanding of speed figures could give a bettor the winning edge, but now that virtually every serious player is armed with a set of figures that edge no longer exists. Similarly, more and more bettors have become aware of the importance of “trip handicapping”--judgments on horses by observations of the way they run. The use of computers may be the next way for a minority of winning players to stay ahead of the crowd.

Handicappers can employ computers in two basic ways. They can use a computer to retrieve information that will be employed as a tool in picking winners. Or they can use computer programs that are designed to pick winners by themselves.

Dennis Smoter of Laurel’s Sports Palace watches patrons use the computer terminals there and said that latter approach is “by far the most popular.” Laurel’s computers use a program designed by mathematician and author Bill Quirin that lets the user weigh different factors according to his own preference, after which the computer analyzes a race and gives its selections.

It is doubtful, however, that any computer will ever be able to create a “system” that beats the races. The thoroughbred game has always defied generalizations because it is so complex, diverse and ever-changing. The real use for computers is their ability to make available data for use as a handicapping tool.

Understanding the methodology of trainers is a vital part of the game. For many years, I kept track of trainers laboriously by jotting notes about their winners on index cards. But now at the Sports Palace a handicapper can obtain, at the push of a button, the record of any trainer in Maryland in 28 categories of performance. How does he perform with first-time starters, with horses coming off a layoff, with horses dropping in class?

Pedigree information can be crucial in certain situations--such as when a horse is making his first start on the turf or in the mud. Handicappers have always talked loosely about “grass sires” and “mud sires,” but the Handicappers’ Data Base now provides the winning percentage for all the progeny of every stallion in North America under these various conditions.

The value of such information should be self-evident to any serious horseplayer. Yet as I have started to incorporate such data in my handicapping I have learned that this is not an easy tool to use. It is easy to be overwhelmed with statistics--often conflicting ones--about a single horse or a single race. It is sometimes hard to judge whether a statistic about past performances has any predictive value. If a trainer has a lousy record with first-time starters, maybe he just happened to have horses who weren’t bred to be precocious.

And what does a horseplayer do with an undeniably juicy nugget of information? My computer tells me that offspring of the little-known sire Champagne Charlie improve dramatically on the grass, winning 21% of their starts on that surface. Does this mean that a handicapper should bet these horses blindly, bet them when they are 5-1 or better, or merely use this knowledge as one component of the whole handicapping process?

I am struggling to find the answers--and so are plenty of other people. The horseplayers who master the new techniques of the game are the ones most apt to be winners in the future.