What do you consider most important

[shoeless]

If you had to pick the one most important aspect when looking at a race
would it be

A: picking contenders

B: picking pacelines


If you had to pick one when using a computer program and you win a race
is it because of

A: what you put into the computer

B: the program you are using

[Bill V.]

Jeff



Once I have the contenders its usually easy to pick a paceline
Once I have my lines into RDSS its the program
that rates them. I just have to make a decision

so my order of importance ?

1.Me Myself and I
2.Contender
3.Paceline
4. Program


What is the most important ? Its Me because I am the one that
decides The contenders, the pacelines, and how to bet what the program
calculates

[Ted Craven]

Question 1: My answer is: A. picking contenders. My software does about 75% correct job (for me) picking pacelines, but a horse needs to be in condition today to duplicate or exceed that previous effort - at today's surface, usually (but not always) at today's distance structure, and in the face of today's balance of likely early pressure.

Examples of contender decisions: Laid-off too long, but with great back performance: good candidate for in-the-money; lack-lustre recent form (e.g. last 2 recent races) but great earlier numbers: not for win; burning up the Turf but running Dirt today and not much previous success there: toss for Win.

That said, some races are full of (written for) mostly bad looking horses, so after I get finished eliminating everyone if I have a reason to play the race, the second cut is leaving the least worst as Win contenders.

My paceline selection is mostly automated and I find pretty easy to make any changes according to repeatable guidelines. Thus paceline selection gives me a ranking of horses I choose to leave as Win contenders (and in-the-money contenders for exacta) - I usually don't know for sure who among my top 3 or so Contenders will win, but betting 2 of those (when possible) is the way I then proceed to try to make money on Contender selection.

Question 2: I can't answer this question the way I suspect you mean it. I don't "put horses into the computer" - the horses are already "in the computer". And since I care more about making money from a wager than I do about picking a winner(s) - and since my software is not a betting black box - but since I could not otherwise rank pacelines or properly identify contenders without the computations and rankings of my software - then I'd have to call winning a race a partnership between my own consistent decision making and the software's number crunching, sorting and filtering.

But not only when winning a race: since I don't base any success or failure on a single race, rather a series of races (e.g. 20 races), when my betting decision ends up making no money, or returning less than my wagers, that's also the responsibility/credit of both me and my software tools. In other words, an integral part of betting, say, 20 races and winning half of them at some kind of net positive ROI - is losing half of them but making consistent contender, form, and paceline decisions in ALL of them. Trying to make consistent decisions, trying to only include reasonably recently competitive horses as Contenders (but holding a fairly liberal definition of competitive) - has helped me have close to the same emotional response to losing bets as to winning bets. I'm going to lose about half my bets (or make no profit on them), so every losing bet brings me a bit closer to the distribution of winning events I have seen over enough recent wagering history to give me confidence that the next profitable bet is coming up shortly.

Ongoing success (making more from my winning wagers than I lose on my losing wagers) is teamwork between my brain and my software tools.



Ted

[Ted Craven]

Upon thinking further about what I wrote above, it occurs to me to elaborate that I think losing races is good!

Why? I need to be participating in races where there is a fair chance I will lose my bet (or some of it) because there is also a certain percent chance I will win a good bet. If I don't have the bravery to 'ante-up' in those kinds of races (and I'm not talking about swinging for the fences on bad looking longshots), then when my fair share of them actually win at longer odds, all that's left for me is the losers lot of moaning and complaining because I was not brave enough to pay up-front the price of losing in order to have a shot at winning at good odds. No pain = no gain.

If you can find a way to take the sting out of losing a bet by knowing where you are in your expected series of wins and losses, you prepare yourself for the inevitable sweet successes which follow.

Ted

[shoeless]

Bill and Ted good answers

Ted, About the second part of the question I was talking about the results
you are getting if you win the race because of you or is it the software itself
that makes you win.


Reason Im asking is after listening to the Hat on a tape talking about
getting the right contenders

The second part was a PM sent to me by a very astute capper

[For The Lead]

This is from the Paceline Manual in a section written by, I believe, Dick Schmidt.

[shoeless]

FTL,

Thanks for posting

[shoeless]

I think a lot of people lose sight of this.

[5Chalky5]

Originally Posted by shoeless

If you had to pick the one most important aspect when looking at a race
would it be

A: picking contenders

B: picking pacelines


If you had to pick one when using a computer program and you win a race
is it because of

A: what you put into the computer

B: the program you are using

Hello-

This is my first weekend using RDSS and I must say that it is an amazing tool.



I would like to thank Ted for all of his help and guidance in getting me started. I also must say that getting used to and understanding RDSS has been simplified since I have been able to read all of your posts from the past few years.

As far as the first question goes I would say that picking a proper paceline is the most important. This is supported by the fact that if you change the paceline it will change readouts that you base your decision on.


For question two since I think that selecting a paceline is the most important I feel as if I must say that what you put into the computer is the more important.


I am sure that as I spend more time using RDSS my opinion will change to these questions, but for now I am concentrating on picking a proper paceline then identifying which information will help me select winners.



Today, I played seven races between Santa Anita and Belmont and I was able to find the below win payoffs by focusing on Total Energy.



$8.80
$17.40
$49.20


Thank you all for sharing all your insight into RDSS.


Kyle

[Ted Craven]

Originally Posted by 5Chalky5

As far as the first question goes I would say that picking a proper paceline is the most important. This is supported by the fact that if you change the paceline it will change readouts that you base your decision on.

Kyle,

First of all, a big welcome to Pace and Cap and thank you for your dedication in taking on this evaluation of RDSS2. You've already done some serious work and I hope this helps a bit.

Here is a random race excerpt which I think illustrates a point that just because you pick a good paceline - or any paceline for a horse - does not necessarily make it a contender to win today's race if it ranks well.



Today's Turf race 7.5f, the #5 horse not only has no good and recent experience running on Turf, but its last 2 races clearly show that it was losing its previous decent form, resulting in the 67 day layoff. To use the 3rd line, or 4th line, or ANY of the good lines for it will rank it more or less in the Top 3, but most people I know of would say that despite that paceline selection, the horse was not a Win Contender today in a Turf race (or perhaps any race).

So the decision about current condition (unknown), suitability for the surface (unproven, recently) would trump paceline ranking.

Also, given that in this particular race there is motley collection of dirt sprints, dirt routers and a smattering of unproven 1 time turfers - the whole race presents excess unknowns and there are far better races in which to employ the good ranking and number crunching tools in RDSS. Here it might be a good idea to pass.

My suggestion would be to carefully investigate form and recency for each horse and balance of unknown factors in a race before blindly accepting rankings based primarily on paceline selection. Sometimes you'll get lucky, but we don't want to do this just by being too lucky ...

Perhaps the above was a trite example, but almost every race has examples of horses who otherwise sit up top on the rankings based on reasonable paceline decisions, who clearly will be very unlikely Win Contenders.

For your consideration ...

Ted