[AbqVic]

Hello everyone. I joined Pace and Cap about a week ago, and have been surfing around to orient myself to the forum. The knowledge and depth of experience comprehended here from reading the threads is truly amazing. All the posts reflect a genuine desire to help, and also contribute to advancing handicapping technique. I feel very grateful to have found the site, and privileged to be a member.

As to my own handicapping knowledge, it is effectively zero. However, I do have some experience from almost fifty years ago when I lived in Southern California. I lived about thirty minutes driving time from both Santa Anita and Hollywood Park. I spent about a year in the evenings trying to learn how to handicap by studying “Ainslie’s Complete Guide to Thoroughbred Racing.” I would go to the track on Saturdays. Needless to say, I wasn’t very successful, or I would still be doing it!

Of course the endeavor itself was challenging, but looking back, I think as a young man I was too emotionally weak to withstand the ignorant criticism of family and friends who warned me that “the races can’t be beat” and “they are a waste of time.” I knew better because I understood probability, and the concept of expected returns, but emotions can defy logic.

Since giving up on handicapping, I haven’t given racing any thought at all these past years. Until a few weeks ago, when for some unknown reason, it dawned on me that with the widespread availability of computing power, and the advent of the internet, thoroughbred racing must be very different than it used to be. I started searching for modern instruction books and that research led me to the name “Sartin Methodology,” and then to this site.

As Ted Craven posted in one of the threads, there are many approaches to handicapping, but they all converge eventually, if the student seeks improvement. I also noted myself that the Sartin Methodology has a very long and evolving history that presents obsolete and conflicting methodology to the new “wanna be” handicapper.

In the past, I always approached new learning projects by buying every book I could find, then reading them all, with the idea of becoming an expert, before I began the actual doing. That was a mistake. The shotgun approach was not very effective for me because I didn’t really own any of the concepts. I became familiar with them, and that is not good enough when you need to actually apply theoretical ideas. The weakness of the shotgun approach is probably especially true with handicapping. There is a wealth of knowledge here on this site, but so far it has led me to confusion because I cannot coherently organize it.

I believe what I need now is an anchor, something to orient and tie new knowledge onto as I learn it. So my plan now is to follow Bill V’s simple strategy for getting started by acquiring RDSS and reading Follow Ups #80 through #88. I want to establish a base line win percentage and ROI (even if negative) and hopefully improve from there.

Thank you all for supporting this fantastic forum.

Victor

PS: After reading the “Five Step Approach to the Match-Up,” I realized that it must have been written with a manual typewriter. The space bar and carriage return were apparently used to format it. To aid my own understanding, I reformatted it in MS Word, and then converted it back to PDF. I made no attempt to change the writing style or content, but the document did shorten considerably. It is attached here if anyone would like to use it.