Systems All Go for Them

Gary Margolis will be at Santa Anita Park again today, scribbling in the margins of his Daily Racing Form, same as usual, except with maybe a slightly shakier hand and quicker pulse.

Margolis has a small stake in Ten Most Wanted, one of the leading contenders in today’s Breeders’ Cup Classic. He says he owns about 5% of the horse, give or take.

“Just say ‘one of the 10 largest listed owners,’ ” he says, scripting his own bio blurb. “Like, the ones who get the publicity.”

Beyond that, Margolis is an avid horse player, a self-described “contrarian” whose driving passion is “finding the 20-to-1 longshot that has a shot.” And for him, the Breeders’ Cup is the Super Bowl covered in Christmas wrapping paper and served up with heaping helpings of Thanksgiving turkey, Easter ham and Fourth of July apple pie.

“It’s definitely a great day for betting,” he says. “The fields are really big. That helps anybody. Because you get value.

“Take the Classic. Right now, they have us and Medaglia d’Oro at 7-2. There may be one or two 4-to-5s or 6-to-5s. There’s really good horses that are going to be 9-, 10-, 15-, 20-, 30-, 40-1! Horses that people have, like, admired. ‘God, that horse is 40-1!’

“I remember in the Classic one year, betting against A.P. Indy, I had this horse that was 80-1. And I swear I thought he had a chance. After a mile of a mile-and-a-quarter, he turns for home in the lead! By, like, a length. And then he got swallowed. He almost held on for third and got fourth. Eighty to one! “

Big fields. Big odds. The best horses. The best jockeys. For bettors, the Breeders’ Cup offers a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, except, better yet, they hold it every year.

“It’s the one day that offers the best of everything: horses, quality, value,” says Vinnie Perrone, a D.C.-area horse racing writer. “And then with the pick six, there’s the opportunity for a score that could change your life. And that doesn’t generally happen every day.”

Consequently, the Breeders’ Cup is a breeding ground for every kind of handicapping system to ever wobble to the window. It attracts a bizarre mix of the sophisticated and the absurd, the studied and the silly, with labor-intensive decimal-dotted spreadsheets going head-to-head with hunch bets, dart throws and crazed finger pokes smudging the ink of the Racing Form.

To put it another way, Breeders’ Cup betting runs the gamut from “the sheets” to “between the sheets.”

“The sheets” are graph-sheet compilations of “speed numbers” that chart a horse’s career and, in theory, project when a horse is likely to run a fast race and when it probably will “bounce,” or regress, after running a taxing race.

They were pioneered by Harvard graduate Len Ragozin in the 1990s and since have been rivaled by the Thoro-Graph sheets, created by a former Ragozin employee, Jerry Brown.

The Ragozin sheets and the Thoro-Graph sheets have attracted fierce followings among serious bettors and trainers such as Bobby Frankel, who contributes a personal endorsement on the Thoro-Graph Web site, claiming that the product “measures exactly how well horses have performed in the past by factoring in variables not included in other speed figures. Then they put every horse’s figures on its own graph, which lets me know where each one is in its own form cycle.”

Such knowledge doesn’t come cheaply. The Ragozin sheets are sold at the track for $35 each day, the Thoro-Graph sheets for $25.

“Between the sheets” is a less expensive system that involves no mathematic theory, statistical research or insider’s knowledge. In fact, it is free, and it requires no knowledge of horse racing whatever -- only an active, and somewhat provocative, imagination.

Los Angeles Times horse racing writer Bill Christine laughs as he outlines the “methodology.” Christine has heard of eccentric betting schemes during his many years covering the sport, and “between the sheets” ranks with the wackiest.

“You take the names of the horses and look for the one that would be the most suggestive,” he says. “That’s the one to bet.”

By way of example, Christine runs down the entries of a recent Oak Tree race.

“Let’s see: CantBeDenied between the sheets.... Howamidoin between the sheets. Hmm. They seem to match.”

It’s not a perfect system. But then, what is? Times horse racing handicapper Bob Mieszerski watches races every day, then watches replays every night, trying to envision how a particular race will be run, factoring in probable pace of the race, probable front-runner, class of the horse, trainer and track conditions. On the other hand, he says he knows “someone who bets horses only with weather names, or with weather in their names. Or ‘north,’ things like that.

“I talk to her and ask, ‘Why do you do that?’ And she says, ‘Well, I like those kinds of names.’

“Whatever works for you. She does better than I do.”

Christine describes himself as “practically a non-bettor,” but when he does partake at the track, he sometimes trots out the Holy Ghost system, as in the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.

“This is a system where, if the same number wins two races, you bet the same number again,” he says. “Say the No. 5 wins two races -- the Father and the Son -- you’re supposed to bet the Holy Ghost coming in, the same number coming in a third time. Frequently, you’ll get some longshots.”

Christine recalls mentioning the system to an old friend, a devout Catholic who had attended Notre Dame.

“He said, ‘Gee, that’s an interesting system, but it’s a tad sacrilegious. I love the system but I’m afraid of a lightning bolt if I play it.’

“So he began calling it the Peter, Paul and Mary system and continued to play it right to the grave, figuring he wouldn’t get in trouble with the man upstairs because he changed the name of the system.”

Name change or not, these kinds of whimsical schemes are sacrilege to the serious horse player.

“At least among the ne’er-do-wells I associate with, they tend to take this thing seriously,” Perrone says. “It’s almost like a challenge to their horse racing manhood. It breeds this sort of macho attitude toward the thing....

“There is a lot of science to it. That is the most compelling and the most damning aspect of it, because it is a tremendously intellectual exercise. Because you’re faced just on paper with this continent of data on each horse -- and not only where they finish but how they run, where they are on the pace, how far they run, dirt or turf, what track they run .

“And so you’re asked to synthesize this tremendous volume of material. And what to me is so attractive -- and to the basic bettor is so uninteresting -- is that people generally don’t want to work that hard. That’s why casino wagering is so popular -- you just, you know, roll the dice, flip a card. There’s a great deal of mathematics to [handicapping].”

Andrew Beyer, horse racing columnist for the Washington Post, wistfully recalls a bygone era, dating to the 1970s and earlier, when “lots of people went to the racetrack [and] they bet hunches, they bet names, they bet silks they liked. For the most part, those people aren’t at the race track anymore.

“There are so many alternate gambling opportunities today. If you want to play hunches or lucky numbers, you could just buy a lottery ticket or take a sheer gamble, play a slot machine. I say this with regret because the racetracks used to be filled with so many unsophisticated people it was not difficult for a studious player to get an edge.”

Beyer believes “the public bets a lot more intelligently than it used to.” For that, he can partially blame himself. The Beyer Speed Figures are now an industry staple, featured in the Racing Form. The numbers gauge how fast a horse was running on a particular surface and how that performance compares with that of another horse running under different conditions.

Tony Allevato, executive producer of the TVG horseracing network, outlines the concept in lay terms:

“Putting it in human terms, let’s say you would run in the 100-yard dash, and you ran it in 10 seconds at the beach in deep sand. And then I ran the 100-yard dash at the beach, but where the water hits the sand, and I ran it in 9.5 seconds. The truth is, you actually ran 100 yards faster than I did because you ran on a deeper track. That’s what the speed figures are all about.”

Beyer: “It’s not an original concept. When I started playing, the orthodox view in American racing was that class was what counted and the old cliche that time was only important when you’re in jail.

“I started looking at times of races and looking at a methodology without any reason to believe that it would work. Suddenly, when you started looking at horses in the context of whom is faster than whom, suddenly so many things which had seemed contradictory in the sport suddenly made sense. A seemingly cheaper horse beats a quote-unquote ‘classier’ horse -- why did it happen? Well, often he was running faster than the supposedly classier horse in the first place.

“Since our numbers have been in the Racing Form, much of the racing public sees the same thing. Obviously, the game has lots and lots of variables. [But] when a horse is consistently faster than the competition, he’s often going to win.”

Allevato says he respects the Beyer Speed Figures, but prefers the Thoro-Graph sheets because, “In this day and age, there is so much information available for the bettor that you’re looking for that edge, something everybody else doesn’t have.

“The Beyer Speed Figures are in the Racing Form every day. Everybody uses the Beyer Speed Figures. It doesn’t really give you any advantage to look at Beyer Speed Figures.

“Thoro-Graph speed figures are really catered more toward bigger bettors. They sell for $25 a day. And it’s a more sophisticated product. It’s a little more accurate than the Beyer Speed Figures. And, in my opinion, it gives you an edge.

“I’ve been in horse racing since 1986, 17 years, and it’s the difference between winning and losing.... It’s so hard to win in any type of gambling, especially horse racing. The key with Thoro-Graph is that you’re able to identify false favorites, or favorites that are very beatable and try to beat those horses.”

Beyer says he has “philosophical differences” with the Thoro-Graph and Ragozin sheets.

“I respect them,” he says. “They’re as serious about what they’re doing as my associates and I. I’ve always been dubious about the premise that you can just look at numbers on a page or on a sheet of paper and foretell future trends. ‘You know, this horse is getting stronger, this horse is due to regress.’ Just by looking at how fast they run.

“I think that’s a bit simplistic and unrealistic. That’s my personal opinion.... All of us -- they and we -- make numbers that express how a horse performed in the past. They would maintain that certain patterns of these numbers will foretell the future. I’m not a believer in that premise.”

Perrone says he has never used the sheets.

“I look at them and, you know, I might as well be trying to read cave scrawlings,” he says. “But I’ll say this -- people I know, a great many ardent and capable handicappers, have used them over many, many years, and they swear by them....

“Clearly, there’s a lot of merit to it. I just figured that was one more car I didn’t need to drive. I’m already pretty erratic enough.”

Jay Privman of the Daily Racing Form says he uses the Beyer figures regularly when handicapping races, but finds the sheets’ methodology “a little flawed.” He describes his own handicapping technique as “not really a system, but, without sounding conceited, it’s more of an art. Where you sort of get a feel for handicapping a race.

“What I’ll do is look at a race and try to figure how will this race shapes up. Is there one front-runner in the race, or several front-runners? Is the pace going to be really fast, or slow? By that, I’m looking at: OK, if the pace is going to be slow and there’s only one front-runner in the race, that horse might have an edge. He might be able to get the lead, slow things down and keep going.”

Privman says he looks at Beyer figures “just as a guide. It helps you narrow down the contenders. If there are 12 horses in a race and six of them consistently run a Beyer Speed Figure of 100 and six of them consistently run a Beyer Speed Figure of around 80, well, it’s going to be tough for that group of six that runs 80 to really matter in the race, no matter how it’s run. So you can eliminate some of those horses.

“I think most people kind of do it that way. I don’t think most people are locked into one method. I don’t think there are people who say, ‘I’m looking at whoever has the fastest Beyer Speed Figure and that’s what I’m betting on.’ That’s a very unsophisticated way of looking at it. There are probably people who do that. But they probably don’t do very well.

“I think, to be successful, you have to have sort of an intuitive feel for it after a while. Just doing it and anticipating -- ‘OK, this is a horse who I know, who usually runs well with a lot of time between races, but today they’re bringing him back only a week and a half after his last race, I don’t think he’s going to run as well as his last time.’ You just sort of look at a horse’s career and get a feel for that.”

Still, even the most informed and lucid handicapper approaches his craft the same way a batter in baseball approaches home plate. Anything above a .300 batting average is considered a success.

“There’s no system in horse racing that’s a sure thing,” Allevato says. “There never will be -- that’s why it’s called gambling. And if there was, it wouldn’t be any fun, would it?”