Handicapping: Never Have So Many Tried So Much for, Usually, So Little

At the 1980 Belmont Stakes, Charles Feeney, a Pittsburgh sportswriter, shocked his press box colleagues by betting a bundle on the No. 3 horse, a long shot named Temperence Hill.

When the horse won and paid $108, Feeney was asked why he had bet on the 50-1 shot. Not even Temperence Hill’s trainer had thought enough of his horse’s chances to risk money on him.

Feeney, to the consternation of horseplayers everywhere who take their sport and handicapping seriously, said he had made the bet for his wife, Bea. “She always bets the No. 3 horse in stakes races,” he said.

Odds are, that of the $8,099,803 bet on horses by 43,198 humans at Santa Anita one recent day, a couple of million or so were bet by men and women using a handicapping system about as scientific as Bea Feeney’s.

In their pursuit of riches, humans who bet on horses do some odd things. Although there are many serious horseplayers who study form as carefully as a handicapper for the Daily Racing Form, some will bet on the jockey, the trainer, the owner’s colors, the post position of the horse, or will use some bizarre systems they have invented or borrowed.

Betting systems, some with improbable names, abound at race tracks. One is called the Divorce Special, another the Chinese System. Money is also risked on the Holy Ghost and Dirty Shirt systems. Also used extensively are the Sequence System and the Weights and Odds System.

But many bettors, who wouldn’t know a handicap from a horoscope, use pet systems that have no colorful names. They bet lucky numbers, favorite colors and names, dates of birthdays and anniversaries and the nationalities of the owners and horses. They’d rather bet hunches than form.

Jill Dwyre of Diamond Bar bets on Irish horses, or those with Irish names. Miriam Shuster of Sherman Oaks will bet on any horse if its stable’s colors include turquoise. Typical of many bettors was the character in the film, “Mildred Pierce,” who said, “Bet it across the board. I know it’s a dog, but I like red horses.”

A Los Angeles journalist bets on horses with pornographic connotations to their names. “I haven’t made any money,” he said. “I have good theories, but I’m a born loser.”

One maxim advises: “Lay off the favorites in claiming races.” Another says: “Never bet on fillies.”

If it is the 18th day of the month, many players bet the No. 1 and No. 8 horses in the daily double. Others bet a combination that adds up to their ages. Similar bets are popular in exactas.

If a race has a small field, say five or six horses, many bettors play them all to win and pray for a long shot to win. Other bettors take half of whatever bankroll they have determined they can lose and use it to bet the favorite to win in every race.

A bettor said that once he won money on a horse named Las Palmas at Santa Anita. And why had he bet Las Palmas? “I drove by that street on the way to the track.”

All betting systems, however, have something in common. They are, in the long run, losers.

“If you think you have a winning system, the track will pay your plane fare and send a taxi for you,” said Ernie Mason, who has been handicapping horses for Los Angeles-area newspapers for 41 years.”

A Times reporter tried most of the systems listed above at Santa Anita recently, and, ignoring jockeys, trainers, odds, class and speed ratings, and betting $2 on each of 15 races, lost $8. His wife, who believes the best way to make money is to bet long shots to show, fared better. She deviated from her system twice, however, betting on a woman jockey and an Irish horse, winning on both.

Jane Goldstein, Santa Anita’s director of publicity, said she knows people who bet only on gray horses, or horses with names similar to their own or their children’s. “I’ll do it, too,” she said. “A horse named Golsteen was so close to my name I bet it every time it ran.”

Most betting systems are very unscientific, Goldstein said. Many bettors, for example, bet the daily double using their lucky numbers.

She said that once at the Fairgrounds track in New Orleans, a woman won the first race of a daily double and had it wheeled to every horse in the second race except one, which won and paid a big price. The woman hadn’t bet on it because she said it was her unlucky number.

“The systems will work one day and the next day they won’t,” said Los Angeles sportscaster Jim Healy, an experienced hand who sometimes bets some odd ways himself. For example, when a foreign horse makes its first start in this country, Healy bets on it.

“That’s the opposite of what everyone else does,” he said. “But it works pretty well. I’m ahead on it.”

Healy will also bet on a 2-year-old horse wearing blinkers for the first time. “Blinkers can improve a 2-year-old,” he said. “But only 2-year-olds.”

Healy also also said that he never bets more than $10 on any race. “That way, you’ll never get hurt,” he said.

Novelist William Murray is also a $10 bettor, quite unlike Shifty Anderson, the character in his latest novel, “The Hard Knocker’s Luck.”

A hard knocker, by Murray’s definition, “is a man who would rather bet his money on a horse race than do anything else, except possibly breathe.”

Murray describes himself as a very boring bettor, but he said that he goes to the track a couple of times a week “to get a fix.” He is not, however, out there to lose money. “I’m a serious handicapper,” he said.

Murray met his wife, Alice, at the track 12 years ago. “My opening line was ‘Who do you like?’ ” he said. “She gave me the name of a filly and she won.”

Before she met her husband, Mrs. Murray had prophetic dreams about race horses, bet on them and won a bundle of money.

In one bizarre dream, jockey Laffit Pincay was helping her with her laundry. A friend suggested that the dream meant that Pincay was going to help her clean up, so she went to the track and bet on him in every race. Pincay won six times.

Mrs. Murray no longer dreams about winners or goes to the track. “The minute I walked into her life, she stopped having dreams,” Murray said.

Betting the races is a very tough racket, Murray said. “The majority of people who go to the track don’t know what they’re doing. Some will bet the favorite to show. That’s kind of nutty. It’s a guaranteed loss.”

Still, he believes, horse racing offers the serious gambler the best way to make a living, next to poker. “Poker is a game of skill,” he said. “It’s much the same at the track.”

What Murray doesn’t like about racing are the enormous pots created by exotic wagering. “The bigger the pots, the less honest racing is likely to be,” he said. “It is an invitation to larceny.”

Murray gets much of his enjoyment from racing out of the marvelous characters on the backstretch. “They are really characters out of Damon Runyon,” he said.

Murray told of a character known as the Desperado, who approached a tout one day after the eighth race.

“I’ve got the winner of the ninth,” he told the tout. The tout ignored him.

The Desperado pressed his case, but the tout said: “I don’t want to know.”

“OK,” the Desperado finally said. “Give me $10 and I won’t tell you.”

At Santa Anita the other day, Larry Peal and Earl Holst played a betting game using a tip sheet. Holst took the tout’s first selection and Peal the second. In the first race, Peal collected $193 on a 35-1 shot winner, Upper Rullah. But when an 80-1 shot listed on the sheet won the third race, they had changed to another system.

The reporter, who had recently been on the Nile River, also bet on Upper Rullah, to show, because its sire was named Upper Nile.

Holst, who likes to bet on names, backed Naturally Natalie--his wife’s name is Natalie--in the second race and the horse ran out of the money.

The long shot the two men blew in the third race was Curra’s First, ridden by Steve Crowder. If they had been betting the Divorce Special system, they would have been on it. Using that system, a bettor puts his money on a horse whose name begins with the same letter as the last name of its jockey.

Trying it for the first time, the reporter bet the combination of Savio and Ray Sibille--and won 60 cents. Savio, it turned out, was the favorite, which the reporter, in his eagerness to bet the Divorce Special, overlooked.

Nobody seems to know why the system is known by such an odd name. Ernie Mason said: “It’s because women use it a lot, and it causes friction between wives and husbands.”

Nobody really knows, either, how the Dirty Shirt System got its name, Healy said. A bettor using the system looks for a horse in the Racing Form consensus that is picked to win, place or show by only one handicapper. “If it is mentioned twice, forget it,” Healy said.

Mason said: “If a horse is mentioned only once, it has some merit. You are betting to get a price.”

Lost in the mists of time, too, is how the Chinese System got its name. Here is how it works: A bettor, using a race program, starts with the No. 1 horse and goes down the alphabet. When the number agrees with the first letter of a horse’s name, say, Beverly Drive is the No. 2 horse, you’ve got a winner, or so the theory goes.

To author Murray, however, the Chinese System is a bet on the Nos. 1, 2 and 4 post positions, and running down the alphabet on the track program is the Hungarian System.

In the system known as the Holy Ghost, when a jockey or trainer--”Usually, it’s the jockey,” Healy said--wins two races in one afternoon, “You keep betting them after that to complete the Trinity.” Some bettors play the same system by post position. After the third win, according to The Times’ Bill Christine, that system is known as the Amen.

Charles Lohman of Los Angeles, who goes to Santa Anita every day and said he wins enough money to supplement his retirement income, makes his own consensus from five tout sheets, the Racing Form and the Herald-Examiner. He also frequently bets the Weights and Odds System. He adds the odds listed in the track program to the horses’ weights and bets the horse with the lowest total.

The Sequence System is less complicated. A bettor simply plays the No. 1 horse in the first race, the No. 2 horse in the second race, the No. 3 horse in the third race and so on.

“You’ve got to win to keep coming here,” said a bettor named Skippy, from Alhambra, who goes to Santa Anita every day. “I don’t buy tip sheets. I go for a good jockey or trainer. I’m also a stable bettor. I bet all the Elmendorf Farm horses. (Trainer) Ron McAnally knows how to spot a good horse. Bobby Frankel, too.”

Jerry and Helen are a husband-wife betting team. Jerry keeps track of speed ratings in a personal computer and bets mainly on speed and class.

Said Helen: “I go by speed, too, but I also use intuition a lot.”

Although they are usually pretty close on their bets, they said, on this day Jerry had just won an exacta by betting on speed and his wife had blown her money by betting her husband’s birthday. “I was just reprimanding her,” Jerry said.

Moe Michels of Pasadena likes speed, too, but added: “I like early speed better than come-from-behind speed.” And on this day, he also liked what he called the 1-hole, the first post position.

“It’s just like a freeway today,” he said. “It’s getting early speed. Usually it’s a bad position on short races. I go to the 1-hole on long races.”

A former jockey once told Jesse Longacres, a retired Long Beach schoolteacher, to bet the horse with the second-best odds to place. However, Longacres prefers to bet certain jockey-trainer combinations.

Of all the betting systems, the most bizarre probably is the practice of sticking a pin through the eye of a horse pictured on front of the track program and betting the horses whose names are punctured.

Bettors who risk their money in such odd ways never look at a Racing Form handicap and wouldn’t know how to read one if they did. While reporting a betting story from Del Mar on “60 Minutes” the other night, Harry Reasoner said, “I paid $1.75 for a Racing Form which tells you more than you need to know--or can understand.”

Jack Schwartz of Culver City agrees. “Too much information is no good,” he said. “I don’t fool around with the Racing Form. I could misread it and it would get me off the horse I like.”

Much of the weird betting is done by women, said Dan Smith, a self-described semi-serious bettor and the director of publicity for the Del Mar Turf Club. Why?

“They don’t read the Racing Form,” he said.

Professional handicappers view all this weird betting with amusement.

“One man’s screwy system is another man’s brilliant one,” said Andrew Beyer, turf writer for the Washington Post.

Beyer is a sophisticated bettor and an expert handicapper who takes his work seriously. “I make money,” he said the other day. “If I don’t exceed my Post salary while I’m here at Santa Anita, I’d consider myself a failure.”

Most handicappers apply some kind of rational process to their work, Beyer said. For example, he watches every horse in every race “to try to form a more subjective impression.” He has a detailed record on every race run in California this year, in fact. Each day he analyzes the track condition to see how it affected the time of each horse.

“I keep records to win a lot of money,” he said. “Most racegoers are not an intellectual group, but more and more, serious, intelligent people are attracted to the handicapping game. It’s hard work.”

Beyer does not handicap for the Post because, he said, “They couldn’t pay me enough.”

Perhaps it is hard work for serious professionals such as Beyer and Mason. But 95% of all bettors are losers, and many get their fun out of collecting on one or two bets an afternoon.

They’ll take their winners any way they can get them, whether it’s betting gray horses, Irish horses, their son’s birthday, jockeys dressed in turquoise or long shots to show. They wouldn’t enjoy studying notes and numbers four to six hours a day. The money is nice, in their view, but winning is the fun of it.

Besides, if you take the races seriously, there are some elements to consider that do not appear in handicaps:

Do the jockey and your horse really match up? Is every horse in every race running to win, or is your horse out for only experience and exercise? Are you aware of all the instructions passed along by the owner and trainer? Does your jockey ignore these instructions--or, in fact, does he even get any? Some jockeys are on their own, you know.

Is the trainer of your horse experimenting, say, by sending a slow starter out to get the lead? Will the jockey misjudge your horse’s mood and be gentle when he should be going to the whip?

And what of your horse? Does it want to win? Jockey Eddie Arcaro once was quoted as saying, “At least 70% of all racehorses don’t want to win.” To most bettors it probably seems that way.

It has been suggested that persons with extrasensory perception can beat the races. Well, a dozen years ago, a woman in New York tested her ESP, betting on 95 horses in 36 races over four days. She picked 12 winners, but if you had bet $2 on each of her choices you would have lost $67.

Most bettors, of course, cannot refuse a tip, which is described in the dictionary as “a piece of information given secretly or confidentially in an attempt to be helpful.”

Tips come from all sources, among them former boxers, stablehands, mothers-in-law, wives and $2 tout sheets, and shrewd bettors have the good sense to ignore them.

But Vic, a barber from Whittier, got one once that he couldn’t refuse. He went to Caliente to watch his nephew, a jockey, ride a “hot horse.”

“Bet it,” he was told.

But while observing the animal in the paddock, another horse--”He was an ugly gray,” Vic said--came over and nuzzled his arm.

The gray horse won and Vic, forgetting his nephew, had his $2 on it. After all, he’d gotten that tip from the horse’s mouth.