Computer Bets: For Most, It Doesn’t Compute

Can a person use a computer to solve the mystery of handicapping horses?

There is no record of anybody getting rich doing it, but Dick Mitchell seems to have succeeded where other humans have failed, even those with extrasensory perception. He is beating the races.

Mitchell teaches computer science at Los Angeles City College at night and plays the races by day. He also teaches seminars on how to bet with computers and is writing a book on his expertise.

For 10 years, Mitchell said, he played the races recreationally. “And, I lost, lost, lost.”

Four years ago he started playing them on his personal computer and today, he said, he wins 70% of the time.

He usually bets only about four races a day and in each race he throws out “a bunch of horses who don’t belong in the race.”

He said: “There are usually four races, on the average, that are predictable. You can throw out the others.”

He usually bets horses to win, “unless the odds dictate that you do otherwise.” One exception: “If the horse is even money, I bet place and show all the way.”

Santa Anita and Hollywood Park are vastly different tracks, Mitchell has learned on his computer. “Horses have to use 53% of their energy in the early part of a race at Santa Anita and 51.5% at Hollywood Park,” he said.

“There really are courses for horses. This is not theoretical stuff. We studied 12,000 races at Del Mar, Santa Anita and Hollywood Park.”

Mitchell gives each track a profile, a mathematical expression of the types of running styles which succeed at a particular track. For example, Santa Anita, he found, favors speed. “We’re dealing with the physics of the way horses run,” he said.

The Mitchell methodology--”It’s not a system,” he said--stems from a study made by a clinical psychologist, Dr. Howard Sartin, with eight truck drivers who had alcohol and gambling problems. Their problem, Sartin found, was not gambling, “It was losing.”

So the group set out to find a way to win at the races.

No betting was allowed until the compulsive gamblers could pick winners 45% of the time. “It took nine months,” Mitchell said.

First, the group threw out a bunch of systems that didn’t work. Then they focused on pace and speed. They studied handicaps and learned the importance of early speed, Mitchell said.

A horse’s speed was measured in feet per second and its time was translated into velocity by dividing distance by time. Instead of saying a horse ran a quarter of a mile in 23 seconds and a half-mile in 47 seconds, they would say he ran the first quarter in 57.39 feet per second and the next quarter in 55 feet per second.

In the views of Sartin and Mitchell, this method gives a horse’s true speed.

A horse’s time is deceiving, Mitchell said. Ernie Mason, and many other handicappers, agree.

“Time doesn’t mean anything,” Mason said. “A horse might have stumbled the last time out--or have been forced wide. The track, the jockey and post position were different.”

Mitchell said: “It’s not how fast a horse runs; it’s how he runs fast. All a horse will do is what he has to do. Why should he do more? You will go broke if you bet on times.

“The No. 1 speed horse usually doesn’t win. Why? He is not necessarily the fastest. It was the way he ran fast.”

There are about 600 computer bettors around the country in his group today, Mitchell said. To qualify for the exclusive club, a computer operator must bet two horses a race, win a minimum of 63% of the time and average $8.20 a bet. Some operators average 80% and $9, he said.

“A little Radio Shack computer is adequate; you don’t need expensive hardware,” he said.

On Mitchell’s computer, horses at Santa Anita have a distinctive profile. “But some handicappers are still treating them as if they’re at Hollywood Park,” he said.

Races at Del Mar are easier for Mitchell to pick and, he said, “the Pomona track is a license to steal because horses come from all over the place. We can compare a horse from Longacres at six furlongs to one from Santa Anita at a mile. Some handicappers can’t do this. There is nothing magical about it; we know what the average pace differentials are for each distance.”

Despite averaging $11 a bet, Mitchell goes to Santa Anita only twice a week.

Why does he go so seldom when he wins so often?

“My goal is modest, $100 dollars a day,” he replied. “I’m a teacher.”