Welcome to the Stronach Five Podcast for Friday, February 21. Your hosts, Peter Thomas Fornatale and Jonathon Kinchen, go over the five races in the sequence and explain how they plan on dividing up the contenders into As and Bs to play the bet more efficiently than the typical caveman approach.
This week’s races begin at 3:50 ET and are:
LEG A: LRL R8
LEG B: GP 7
LEG C: GG 3
LEG D: SA 3
LEG E: GP 10
This week’s tickets (before scratches) look like this
All As:
1, 5 with 1, 3, 4, 5 with 3 with 4, 5, 6, 8 with 1, 2, 4, 8
As with one B
7 with 1, 3, 4, 5 with 3 with 4, 5, 6, 8 with 1, 2, 4, 8
1, 5 with 2 with 3 with 4, 5, 6, 8 with 1, 2, 4, 8
1, 5 with 1, 3, 4, 5 with 1 with 4, 5, 6, 8 with 1, 2, 4, 8
1, 5 with 1, 3, 4, 5 with 3 with 7 with 1, 2, 4, 8
1, 5 with 1, 3, 4, 5 with 3 with 4, 5, 6, 8 with 9
Here is a view of the ticket with costs embedded and the all A line played for $2, with the backups in for $1.
Good idea looking back at last week’s ticket. I happened to be looking at the Laurel feed just before leg A went off last week. I thought I caught the end of a graphic displaying the Inthemoney ticket. Is that a regular feature? If so, would it include any changes to the ticket in response to scratches?
This comment is going to go “into the weeds.” As I mentioned elsewhere, I think that, in order to evaluate rigorously how well a player is doing in constructing multi-race tickets, a method is needed to evaluate tickets on a leg-by-leg basis. Evaluating only whole tickets involves small sample size and huge variance. Evaluating individual legs increases sample size and reduces variance. My thought is that each leg should be evaluated based on whether positive or negative equity was created. I’m evaluating equity by (1) calculating the amount each pick cost [A’s cost more than B’s because more combinations run through them; the cost of all selections in a leg sums to the overall cost of the ticket]; (2) calculating how much a win bet in that amount would have paid; (3) increasing that win payoff by 25% to offset the cost of win-pool takeout and breakage not applicable to the horizontal pool; and (4) comparing that increased amount with the overall cost of the ticket. For example in this week’s Leg A, (1) the A’s cost $256 each and the lone B cost $64; (2) a $64 win ticket on the lone B would have paid $544; (3) 125% of $544 is $680; and (4) $680 is 18% more than the ticket cost of $576; so that leg produced 18% in positive equity. Similar calculations for the other legs were (B) +38%, (C) -100%, (D) +443%, and (E) -17%, for an average of +76%. Not bad.
I realize there are flaws in this method. For example, it assumes that the percentage bet on each horse in the horizontal pool will equal the percentage bet on that horse in the win pool. In reality, favorites probably take more money and longshots probably take less in the horizontal pool, but I do not have the data to adjust for that. The method does, however, provide a way to begin to analyze ticket structure. Am I spreading too much in legs where there is a strong favorite? Can I afford to spread more in turf races without creating negative equity? Should more of my B’s be A’s? Or should more of my longshot A’s be B’s? Et cetera.