HORSE RACING : Better Bettors Batter Serious Players

Like most serious horseplayers, I have spent a large portion of my life poring over racing forms, analyzing data and studying films of races because I hold this belief: In the long run, a handicapper who works hard and bets with discipline will be able to show a profit.

But lately I have begun to question that assumption. And last week, after the victory at Laurel of a horse named S.A. Champ, I understood just how drastically the game has changed.

Winning at the track never has been easy, of course. The outcomes of races are influenced by hundreds of complex factors, including unforeseeable ones like bad luck, larceny and inept rides. But a handicapper doesn’t have to be infallible in order to win. Under the parimutuel system, the racing game is a competition among bettors, and a handicapper will succeed if he is sufficiently smarter than the crowd as a whole.

In the past, it was not difficult to acquire such an edge. Twenty years ago most horseplayers had never heard of speed figures, track biases and other sophisticated handicapping tools; racetracks were filled with people who bet on the basis of hunches, myths and misinformation.

Nowadays those hunch players are more apt to spend their money on a state lottery than on a horse race. The people who play horses have been educated by sophisticated literature on the subject; they have access to speed figures from many sources; they may be guided by astute newspaper handicappers; they have ready access to films of past races.

It’s tough for even a professional to find a substantial edge over the crowd. But during the past month, serious horseplayers in Maryland were practically salivating over one such opportunity because, for a few days in mid-January, Laurel developed a powerful track bias. Horses who raced on or near the rail couldn’t win. Even superior horses were collapsing and losing by large margins. Winners invariably swooped to victory on the outside.

Serious players recognized the bias, but it could be assumed that many other people at the track didn’t; nobody posts a sign saying “The Rail is Bad Today.” These serious players would watch the races carefully and make note of all the horses who raced along the rail. When those horses ran again, they would look bad on paper -- having lost their most recent starts by 10 or 20 lengths -- and they might make excellent wagering opportunities. Casual fans would not have a clue about the horses’ merits. There is no situation that produces logical long-shot winners more reliably than the period after an anti-rail bias.

But when the horses who had raced against the bias made their subsequent starts at Laurel, I observed that most of them were well-backed despite their seemingly hidden form. Nobody was being fooled. And the second race a week ago Thursday demonstrated just how smart the crowd had become.

S.A. Champ’s record couldn’t have been much worse. In his most recent start he had finished dead last by 17 lengths. In his eight races previous to that, he had finished 6th, 10th, 5th, 6th, 6th, 5th, 7th, 5th. And now he was being ridden by a lightly regarded apprentice jockey, William Moorfield.

There were some hidden virtues amidst this dismal record. S.A. Champ’s last race had been against better competition, on a day when the rail was bad. He had broken in front, dropped to the rail and opened a three-length lead before he collapsed and lost by those 17 lengths. Still, the merits of this performance were so subtle that S. A. Champ was justifiably listed at 15 to 1 in the morning line.

Yet when the wagering opened, S.A. Champ was the early favorite at 5 to 2. His price finally drifted up to 9 to 2 at post time -- odds that probably came close to reflecting his true chances. He popped from the gate, battled his rival head-and-head around the track and won by a neck.

There was a time, not many years ago, when a horse like this might have paid 20 to 1, might have paid enough to make a horseplayer’s whole season profitable. But the betting public is so sophisticated now that it is hard to find value even on an animal whose record looks so bad.

This is an ominous fact of life for serious horseplayers, and for the racing industry too, because it is becoming increasingly tough for the tracks’ best customers to survive, let alone prosper. As more bettors defect, only the most skilled players will survive, and the competition among them will become even keener.

The only plausible way to give horseplayers a slightly better chance of winning in the long run would be a reduction in the track’s “takeout” -- the percentage that the track removes from every wagering dollar -- which typically ranges from 17 percent to 25 percent. Unfortunately, there is little enthusiasm within the industry for the idea of takeout reduction, and horseplayers must be resigned to battling both tough competition and tough percentages.

Playing the horses is like sitting down at a poker table where everybody is an expert. In the absence of any suckers, or recreational players, nobody can realistically expect to have an edge. And if, in that poker game, the house took a 17 percent cut out of every hand, the results would be foreordained. All the players would eventually go broke, and there would be no game left.