Quote:
Originally Posted by Lt1
Why would you want to go back to the past for something that is not needed. Everything you need to win is already in RDSS today.
Tim
|
It is ego.
I do not want a thirty cents on the dollar ROI if I can get a two dollar and fifty cents ROI. I do not want the winner in my top 3 80% of the time if I can have the winner in my top 1, 75% of the time.
For me, handicapping isn't about grinding out a small profit. It is a challenge to my mind. I joined the US Army when I was 17 years old back in 1984, my parents had to sign permission for me to join since I was still legally a child. They made me a Signals Intelligence Analyst. They sent me to school to learn Korean. I learned how to draw conclusions from patterns in communication traffic. I learned cryptography. I loved figuring out things that no one else could figure out. That is what made that job a great fit for me, even if a peace time army was not a good fit. I love finding patterns.
I got out of the army in 1992 and went to work in Los Angeles developing software. I bought Synthesis in 1999 and met Howard in 2000 when I was having trouble showing a profit with his software. I spent over a month with him helping him with his software and telling him how to incorporate his ideas into the software and how I would convert it over to Windows. Unfortunately, by 2000, Howard was pretty much a broken man. He spoke about the banquet they had for him, and his thought was not that people loved him and wanted to thank him, his thought was that people were symbolically burying him and moving on. He had lost his will to improve the software and lead the methodology and just seemed sad and tired.
I can understand how you see it as the past, since chronologically it used to be in the software and is not now. But I do not think it was supposed to be that way. Were Howard 20 years younger when I met him and not in depression, I believe that those vectors or whatever you would like to name them, the same ideas that Bradshaw and Howard had based Synthesis on, would be the basis for the current methodology.
Having studied them for the last month, I am already seeing patterns in them that are helping me to see which horses are most likely the winner, and which will end up in the money. This is to a degree that the current corollaries do not even come close to matching, at least with my pacelines and my handicapping.
I am certainly not trying to tell other people how to do it. If what you do works for you, awesome! If you like your win percentage and your ROI, great! Don't change. But for me, standing still is not an option. In horse racing, as in many fields, there are very few new ideas. Old ideas are constantly "rediscovered". What makes something profitable in a parimutuel betting system is whether or not the majority of the money is bet on it or something else. Since no one is looking at this these days, that is a good thing to me, not a bad thing.