Bill, you are not hated. You are
loved!
People have different learning styles and relate to different portrayals of what's going on in a horse race (e.g. visual Matchup / numeric representations of velocity/deceleration and balance of energy distributions). I'm not sure how to suggest in advance which style suits someone best who is just coming fresh to these ideas. Perhaps, are you visually oriented - pictures? Or do you like numbers, feel confident in statistics if you can understand some of their derivation? Or do you like 'following instructions' and not delving too deeply?
I think there's an entry point to the broad brush of the Sartin Methodology (which I will use to encompass The Matchup) for
each of the above mental/psychological orientations. Of course, individuals will tend to be proponents of what they have found to work for them - through due diligence and 'the school of hard knocks' - and depending on one's aim in being involved in handicapping and betting horses, life may be too short to try all the approaches. So you have to try to see what matches your own temperament and start there first (or maybe only).
As time goes on (if you continue) and you either gain some winning history (and good endorphins from that) OR you see and believe others' reported experiences and it inspires you to keep learning more - you may then dive deeper into all the other related approaches to analyse a race. They all dovetail in the end. I would recommend becoming an expert in the visual matchup AND using software to measure velocity, deceleration, energy distribution. Software helps you process a LOT of races looking for gems. It is easier to bang through 20 - 30 races per day with the assistance of software than it is by hand. If you need to dive deeper into a given race, the visual matchup helps you know more about which horses' running style are advantaged or disadvantaged by the likely developing pace and the presence of other similar running styles and abilities in the race.
Jim Bradshaw - and I think Richie P to an extent - elevated the art of 'seeing' races to almost a mystical level: a whole brained approach, a 'mind's-eye' approach. Everyone can learn at least something about seeing race info (and life) like this but it takes practice, and is built up from details into a gestalt (greater than the sum of parts). Along the way, you may get it wrong often enough to become discouraged and give up, which would be a shame.
Software can execute consistently and give you opinions which you can then decide how or IF to bet. Record keeping (again, with software) helps you know how your method is doing, in which types of races your strengths lie, which races are bettable, which factors favour or disfavour certain horses in certain types of races - decision models). Software helps you analyse tote betting patterns.
'BOTH / AND' seems a good approach to me. Where to start? My opinion: first leisurely read
Follow Ups 70 - 88. Don't worry that the readouts don't match what you see people posting here, or on your own RDSS screen. Read for CONCEPT.
Also read Jim Bradshaw's
5 Step Approach documents and the
8 Month Update thread. Again, read for CONCEPT.
Then dive into the software since you have it. Do 100 races on paper. Do ALL the races worked by folks in the
Matchup Challenge Contest. Compare results, especially against those who seem to know what they're doing and can explain themselves. You will find a LOT of overlap of winning horses picked by BOTH major flavours of the Methodology.
Doc Sartin always said: The Matchup is the essence of the Methodology - the essence of a horse race. Both he AND Jim Bradshaw - who wrote all the early software programs dealing with velocity, deceleration and energy distribution - sought to
quantify the Matchup observations and make it easier for those not possessing the rarified mental/visual skills of a Bradshaw or Sartin (i.e. MOST of us!) All the tools are imperfect, in a domain of incomplete information and sometimes random and chaotic unfolding events and public opinions (which include both accurate and inaccurate
pricing opinions, aka 'odds' and thus mutuel prices). But the tools and ideas only need to be '
good enough' to nudge you over the edge to profitability over a series of races. For me, over the years, the tools have always been 'good enough' - the biggest obstacle to my own success at any given point in time has always been - ME
! It's getting better ...
How much time do you have?
Welcome
dandy68, enjoy!
Ted