BUCKING THE ODDS : The Quarter Horse Bettors Who Make a Living at It Forsake Workaday World for Life in the Fast Lane

At 7:15 on a cloudy Wednesday night, Tom Thirlby is at his office, hard at work. Several charts and handmade ledgers are spread on the table in front of him, and he shifts quickly from one to another, scratching in tiny entries, fussing with numbers, dates, times, records. He is about to lose money.

Fifteen minutes later, he leaves his “office”--a corner table in the Garden Room bar across from the paddock at Los Alamitos Race Course--and makes a short walk to a nearby TV monitor, where he watches his bet on the first race crash to the track in a flail of hooves and jockey silks. His bet, a quarter horse named Miss Dashing Donna, has stumbled and fallen a few feet out of the gate after making a good break and pulling quickly into the lead.

Miss Dashing Donna was not the favorite. Thirlby doesn’t like to bet favorites. He also doesn’t curse when his horses lose. Neither do his friends, a Damon Runyonesque bunch with names like Tiny and Flypaper and The Hat and Video Ed. They’re professional horse players, and they’ll tell you it’s bad form for pros to gripe about losses.

Each night during quarter horse season at Los Alamitos, the professional players--who number fewer than 10, by their own estimates--stake out their favorite spots in the stands and, armed with racing programs, tout sheets and the hand-printed results of hours of their own handicapping at home, try to make a fast buck. It’s their job, and their only job.

“I’m a day-in, day-out bettor,” Thirlby says. “I never miss a race. I work harder at this than I worked at anything in my life, but I love it.”

Thirlby, 56, who lives in Garden Grove, ran a diagnostic medical instruments company for nearly 20 years, until about five years ago. It was then, he says, that he gave in to his fascination with racing quarter horses. He began playing the horses at Los Alamitos each day and selling less and less X-ray equipment.

“It went from a hobby to a business in about a year,” he says. “Now, I just can’t wait to get out to the track at night. There’s a certain rush you get from gambling.”

Gambling is actually something of a dirty word to the pros. They say they don’t think they’re leaving much to chance. Most of them, pouring over tout sheets, handicapping cards, racing forms and sheaves of their own personalized rundowns for each horse, work at their profession up to 12 hours a day before showing up at the track five nights a week. They see themselves more as students of the sport than as gamblers.

Tom Ciancio, 31, of Cypress, a machine-gun talker who says he commonly bets as much as $400 on a single race--and routinely makes a tidy profit--says that for the dedicated professional horse player, “it’s almost impossible to lose. It’s not even gambling. It’s a science.

“I work about 16 hours a day. I don’t have time to see my girlfriend. I don’t have time to eat. I’ll maybe go to bed at four in the morning and get up at noon and watch the videos straight through, about four hours. There’s nothing else but this.”

The videos are a relatively new arrow in the serious handicapper’s quiver. Since the advent of easily obtainable videotape cartridges, the track makes tapes of each race and sells them to the handicappers the next day for review. Often, say the pros, two or three of them will split the cost of a $15 cassette, and it will make the rounds among them.

Over and over and over each day, through dozens of replays, the pros watch for such arcane giveaways as a horse that jerks its head sideways as the gate springs open. Or a jockey who appears to be pulling the horse one way when it wants to run another, maybe favoring a painful leg. Or a head carried a bit too high. Or a slow start followed by a quick finish.

Or any item in a vast catalogue of minutiae that the casual quarter horse racing fan probably would miss. But it’s these details, plus a dogged determination to have all the information available, that makes the difference between a loser and a pro, says a rotund, amiable pro known to his colleagues as Tiny.

“You have to come up with a system that’s comfortable for you,” he says. “But it takes up your life unbelievably. There are two days a week when they don’t run, but those days I’m doing my charts and my work. I can’t rest.”

Tiny, 28, is from Cypress and wants to keep his real name to himself. He says he has been making a full-time living off the horses for nearly 11 years. It’s the only real job he’s ever had.

“If I did anything else, I wouldn’t be happy,” he says. “I’ve always done it. I fell in love with it, and I enjoy it like nothing else. I like the challenge of trying to make a living at it. I don’t call it gambling. I only bet when I think I have a big advantage. I’m not a gambler. Ninety-nine percent of the people who come out here, they’re gamblers. They don’t know how to do what we do. You really have to be dedicated to make a living at it.”

For some of the players, the track is their home and their acquaintances there are sort of like an extended family. If they take vacations from horse playing, the respite likely will be short, or perhaps spent in another city betting on harness racing or dog racing.

The typical professional horse player is single and has few ties to people or places.

“I’d say two out of three people who do what I do are single,” says Tiny, himself single. “You’d really have to have an understanding spouse to be married and do what I do. To do it properly, you have to have no outside pressures, no pressures from your wife.”

Thirlby, who is divorced and lives occasionally with a son or daughter in Southern California, or sometimes in a motel, says: “There’s no reason (a handicapper) couldn’t marry. But I would say that if you’re looking for a long-term relationship, you’d have to find someone who’s interested in the horses as well. It’s like anybody’s devotion to anything. If a woman’s not with you on it. . . .”

Ciancio has a girlfriend, “but sometimes it’s hard. She understands. But I play only the quarter horses and I can put the track aside and make time for anyone and still probably do as well as I do now. For some, though, the race track and gambling are everything. And when horses and gambling come first, it’s hard to attend to anything else. Most people out here have really little social life. They just eat, breathe and sleep horses.

“Some people I know of, it wiped out their financial backgrounds, broke up their marriages,” Ciancio says. “It’s just like you’d see in the movies.”

All the pros carry a racing program and a fistful of tout sheets listing the recent history and characteristics of each horse. But each has his own personal method of handicapping the animals further. Thirlby’s personal sheets, for instance, look like an accountant’s ledgers. And, beyond that, he constantly scribbles notes, many of them decipherable only by him, in the margins of the night’s racing program.

“It’s like solving a jigsaw puzzle,” Thirlby says. “When I was a kid and you’d get a Dick Tracy decoder with your cereal, I never used the decoder. I always cracked the code myself. This is like that, and you have to keep it up every day.”

How did the horse run last time out? And the time before that? Against whom? Who were the jockeys? And the odds? How did the horse break out of the gate? How often did the jockey go to the whip? What was the condition of the track? Wet or dry? Night or day? How many yards? Who are the owners, the trainers, the breeders. What’s the bloodline? Does he look skittish in the paddock? Are his ankles taped? Is he hard to manage on the approach to the gate? If so, do I have time to cancel my bet?

Thirlby says he sometimes stakes out a spot by a television monitor next to the parimutuel betting windows. He keeps his eyes fixed on the monitor as the horses approach the gate and, if his horse becomes skittish in the last few seconds, he dashes for the window to cancel his bet.

Tiny prefers the open-air view in the grandstand and sits in the same upper corner each day. Video Ed, an habitue who earned his nickname, Thirlby says, through his reliance on video equipment for his handicapping, tends to wander. Ciancio, whose betting sometimes is the center of attention and who as a result earned the nickname Flypaper, works in the middle-upper grandstand.

Binoculars are the most common piece of paraphernalia for the pros. Thirlby keeps a stopwatch lashed to his pair with a short length of surgical tubing. He also wears around his neck a micro-cassette recorder to tape quick impressions and bits of information for later reference.

The trouble, Ciancio says, can be worth it.

“I lost $2,000 one night,” he says. “But I also won $10,000 one night. You can make a real good profit. But you have to be willing to work at it.”

A professional handicapper, Ciancio says, can make $10,000 “and have his worst year ever.” An annual income of $50,000 to $60,000, he says, is considered “a real good year.” Yearly winnings of $100,000 and more have been known among the Los Alamitos group, he adds.

All won on quarter horses. The pros say that variables such as track condition, weather, jockey, breeding and dozens of other items are accentuated when one tries to handicap thoroughbreds. With quarter horses, when a race can be over in slightly more than 17 seconds, “it’s almost all speed” that determines the outcome, Ciancio points out.

Not that the pros don’t try to cut the odds as much as they can. There are a couple of fairly ironclad rules.

“I don’t play favorites,” Thirlby says. “The quickest way to the poorhouse is to play favorites. You play the best value. That’s what gambling is all about.”

Favorites, he says, pay short odds. You may win, but your profit margin will be small. Which brings him to the second rule.

“If you play every race,” he says, “the odds are that you can’t win. You have to be selective.”

Ciancio, for instance, says he’ll play an average of just three races and bet perhaps $400 on each race. Tiny says he’ll occasionally go to the track and not bet at all. There may be no such animal as the mythical “sure thing,” but the pros say that by cutting down the number of races they bet on, they increase their chances of finding it.

“The stock market’s really no different from this,” Thirlby says. “There’s a certain amount of risk. With the stock market, you study companies. With this, you study horses.”

The hard part is the handicapper’s nightmare: the bad streak.

“I’ve gone for three weeks without a win,” Thirlby says. “It got so I forgot how to cash in a ticket.”

Says Tiny: “Mentally, that kind of thing just buries you alive. Sometimes you’ll make bets on races you normally wouldn’t bet on just to try to get an easy win. After a bad night, you have to make yourself go home and work late, even when it’s the last thing you want to do. You have to try to keep an optimistic outlook.”

For some of the pros, the next win may be over the next hill. When the fall quarter horse season ends at Los Alamitos in December, they’ll move north to San Mateo for several weeks to bet the quarter horse season at the Bay Meadows track there. Later, they’ll travel south again when the season begins at Hollywood Park. Some will live with friends, others in motels--still constantly handicapping, sometimes far into the night. Even on the road, however, they say they tend to stick together.

“It’s like a little family out here, basically,” Ciancio says. “It’s a small track and a small crowd and there are maybe five to 10 of us who make our livings off it. It doesn’t take long to become part of the group.”

The pros share information, he says, but not all of it.

“We’re all our own people,” he says. “And we all have confidence in ourselves. If God came out of the sky and told me how to bet, I’d still stick with myself. I know I’m gonna win. It’s just a matter of how much.”

If professional quarter horse handicapping can be a hard, taxing, occasionally rootless life, none of the pros say they are in a hurry to change things.

“I really enjoy it,” Thirlby says. “I like getting up early some mornings and coming out here to clock the horses and look at the lake. And I know so many people out here. I really don’t plan much of anything from day to day, though. I like doing this now, but who knows? Next year, I might want to be a brain surgeon.”