Taking Horseplay Seriously

When Dennis Hahn signed up for a class in “Handicapping Thoroughbred Horse Racing” at Everywoman’s Village, he read a blurb on the instructor--who was described as having “a wealth of experiential knowledge”--but the name “Michael Bloom” failed to ring a bell . . . until Hahn walked into the first class.

Ding-dong. Handing out copies of the Daily Racing Form was a guy Hahn had not seen since the pair graduated from Los Angeles High in 1960. Of course, Michael Bloom knew parlays and parimutuels. As far back as junior high, Hahn said, “Mike Bloom was almost a Damon Runyon type,” obsessed with betting on ponies, cards and football games.

“We played some cards together and did some betting together,” Hahn said. “That was a big thing in those years--I’m amazed at the amount of gambling we did. But Mike has not changed. If he told me he was traveling to tracks around the country playing the horses, I would not be surprised.”

Hahn, however, was surprised to learn that Bloom is far from being an itinerant horse player or crazed gambler or even someone who earns a living teaching others how to bet. Bloom does not have a doctorate in handicapping but he does in something else, a profession so sensitive and image-conscious that it would probably disapprove of his association with gambling and horse racing. Therefore, Bloom requested that his photo and occupation be excluded from this article.

Bloom did agree to discuss his qualifications to teach handicapping. “I’ve been playing the horses all my life,” he said before his first class. “I’m not an everyday player--you’d go bust if you went every day--but if a horse looks right, I’ll bet on it. I don’t go in for big-stakes races, but I can usually make money on a cheap claiming race. I like to get a five-to-two return on my money.”

An intense, slightly built man who lives in Encino with his wife and three children, Bloom bases his handicapping on “a mathematical system, plus a couple of other things.” His hope is to turn suckers into winners who will make “a helluva hit in a race, but 95% of the people who come through the turnstile don’t know what they’re doing,” he said.

Bloom might be camera shy, but there was nothing reticent about his teaching methods. “Are we gonna win at the track or what?” he asked his students as he opened his lecture. “You’re going to learn to approach a race logically. You’re going to learn to pick your spots and lay off races. I’m going to teach you money management and how to make your own selection and not listen to anyone else. All right? OK?”

The students, four men, four women, nodded in agreement. They each were paying $48 for four two-hour classes that met at 8 p.m. on Wednesdays, right after “Beginning Spanish.” The narrow, stuffy classroom, cooled by a humming air-conditioner, is one of several small buildings that make up the Van Nuys campus of Everywoman’s Village.

Handicapping might be an esoteric endeavor, but it by no means is the strangest class taught at the nonprofit school. Other courses listed in the spring catalogue under “recreation” are “Telepathic Communication With Animals” and “Being Single or Divorced in the San Fernando Valley,” which discusses the age-old dating dilemma of “who pays?”

Another class listed under “recreation” is “Playing Blackjack.” It is this course that indirectly led to the blooming of Bloom as a teacher. Bev Sloane, who lives two doors away from Bloom, took the blackjack course last year and told Bloom’s wife, who said, “Gee, Mike, maybe you ought to go talk to them about horse racing,” Sloane said.

Sloane knew Bloom was a player. “His daughter and my daughter are best friends,” Sloane said. “One time my daughter was with Mike when they were coming back from Palm Springs and his car broke down right in front of Santa Anita. He said, ‘That’s a sign,’ and they all ended up going to the track.”

Sloane goes to the track about twice a year. “I didn’t have a clue how to handicap,” she said. “I would pick horses by their name. Then I started calling Mike and getting tips, and I’d do all right.”

Naturally, Sloane signed up for the class, although she’s a little nervous that she’s “going to sound like this awful gambler, but I’m not.”

Bloom, wearing horn-rimmed glasses, did not start his first lesson with “this is a horse,” but he did get into the basic fundamentals of racing--”eight furlongs is a mile”--and the mysteries of the Daily Racing Form. “Stop me if you have something not straight,” he said.

Bloom explained the four categories he considers in handicapping a race: pace, speed, recent record and class of race. Using a real horse’s last race as an example, he copied a line from the Daily Racing Form on the blackboard, saying, “Let’s try to make some sense out of this.”

One of the keys to his system--what he calls his “first pearl”--is giving a horse a speed rating based on the horse’s time at the head of the stretch in its most recent races. “I don’t calculate where he was at the finish,” Bloom said. “We want that horse at the head of the stretch. Trust me.”

But when Bloom began to apply the math, he sensed that some of the students were confused.

“You’ve got to get this down,” he said. “It’s the only complicated thing.”

After the class, most of the students gave Bloom high marks.

“I could understand what he was talking about,” Sloane said.

Hahn said, “I was impressed that he could take something that was so subjective and almost make it a science.”