The gyrations indulged in at a race track by novices at the game are so fantastic that this chapter might be written in the form of broad bur­lesque without getting too far away from the facts, but I will try to be factual and analytical about matters almost too absurd for serious discussion.

Take a case like this, for instance. In the early 30's, just when the depression was sinking its hooks in deep, I was daily at the spring meeting at Belmont Park. In those days the oralists, so called, held sway in New York, and all betting with them theoretically was on credit to comply with a court decision in New York that a bet made on credit was not a wager within the anti-gambling statute. Of course there was very little credit betting; ac­tually one made a deposit with a bookmaker's cashier be­fore the first race, bet against that deposit during the afternoon, and got it back at the end of the day as in­creased by winnings or as diminished by losses. However, one could not pass money to a bookmaker during the races, and that fact tended to keep the same group around a single bookie, the one with whom they had made deposits.

I happened to be betting more or less steadily with Vic Lehman, one of the oralists of those days, and in the crowd about him getting prices I noticed a chap whose clothes were good, not only good but quiet, and whose face lacked that hard-boiled look that becomes a characteristic of many who chase easy money too intently, whether or not they ever catch up with it. I saw this fel­low make a few bets the first day I noticed him, and then on the second day got into conversation with him up in the grandstand.

He was quite frank, although I made no effort to pump him, and it developed that he was a certified public ac­countant who had had an office in Long Island City, with two or three girls in it and ten or a dozen small but fairly substantial clients. Then the depression had forced him to close up shop. The step had left him with about $700 in cash, no means of earning anything that he had been able to discover after search, and a wife and little daugh­ter to support.

So he had figured out a way to beat the races, using a mild progression on the choices of a certain selector on a New York newspaper, and he had come to the track to do it.

I watched the poor devil not critically but most sym­pathetically during the three days it took him to go to the cleaner's. I could see his straining face as each race was run and its ravaged look when he lost, which he usually did. I could see him going over his newspaper again after each loss, checking his selector's choice against the consensus of selectors printed in the same pa­per to see if the opinion of his was in line with the opin­ions of all. I could see him bet $50 on a horse that was really well placed and which lost by mere accident, and then bet more under his progression on a notoriously un­sound horse in the next race that the selector had taken merely because he was just stabbing around in a list of cheap animals and had no. real opinion anyway. No solid opinion is possible in relation to cheap, unsound and in­trinsically erratic platers.

That's the story, and there is plenty in it to bring out in a chapter on the common procedures of novices.

1. The man knew nothing about race horses as animals or about racing as a sport or a business. He admitted it without consciousness of silliness.
   
   
2. The man was an accountant, and seemed rather deeply infected with a notion very prevalent among people—bookkeepers, accountants, engineers, architects and others of the sort—who deal fluently with figures because figures are important in their normal work. The notion is that a knowledge of horses and racing is not a prerequisite to successful betting, and that some arithmetical pattern of progressive play can convert into profit a loss that would have been experienced by betting a series of horses flat, with the same amount on each.
   
   
3. The man was under the most extreme financial pressure as regarded each bet. He had to make money, simply could not lose, therefore was in a state of mind throughout that forbade any exercise of judgment where judgment was called for by his method.
   
   
4. His entire method was based on nothing more substantial than the shaky opinions of one of the least reliable of all selectors on New York City daily newspapers who each year picks less than 25% winners at the New York tracks.

T will now take a directly expositive rather-than nar­rative approach to the various wrigglings of novices at race tracks in their efforts to avoid the hook of loss.

Mr. A, we will assume, marches into the course. We also will assume that he is not a mere amusement seeker, who wants to make a bet on every race, get half tight, and go away winner or loser, satisfied in either event that he has had some fun. Mr. A, in fact, approaches the mutuels as a more or less permanent customer. He is going to beat the horses or know the reason why. He may be a kid, not dry behind the ears. He may be a retired businessman or pensioned employee. He may be a man with some*

sort of business that has been going a little sour, who thinks that perhaps he can bolster the income with a lit­tle horse-money on the side while his brother-in-law takes care of the office or the store. He may be anything, in fact, but one thing he most certainly is not. He is not a person who knows anything about race horses as a type or breed; he is not a person who knows anything about the different classes of horses, the different classes of races, the sig­nificance of the conditions of races, the matters of the ages of horses or the scale of weights. In fact, he knows nothing at all.

But Mr. A is going to find out if it is possible to beat the races, so he becomes a customer at the mutuel windows. Mr. A may have secured the name of his horse in one of two ways—apart from buying .a tip-card as he came in or having it slipped to him by a friend or tout. He may have been sitting up at night for a week or two with a standard racing sheet, scanning the past perform­ances of the horses and checking the next day to see whether his own choices in several races did win. In other words, he may have been picking his own, and may be doing so today, when he plans to back his choices with real money. Or he may be intending to wager on the horses selected by the hired man on his favorite news­paper who has the job of picking horses.

It matters not a bit whether Mr. A picks his own or whether he takes them from a newspaper. Within a brief space of time the gentleman is going to become aware of a very brutal fact, learned by hundreds of thousands of others before him during three hundred years of racing— that it is hard to get winners. Sad to relate, he loses money.

But Mr. A is not licked, far from it. He has bet a num­ber of horses to win, and he has noted that a number of that number ran second or third although they did not win. The solution of his problem immediately becomes apparent, there is a lot of accident or crookedness in rac­ing, so one should be conservative and bet the best horse in each race to place or to show. Therefore Mr. A be­comes a chronic customer of the place or show windows, although occasionally, when a horse is odds on and an absolute standout to win, he buys a straight ticket.

Strangely enough Mr. A continues to lose money, He bet them straight and he lost; he has been betting them place and show and still he has been losing. And right here our hypothetical Mr. A takes one of two paths. It may begin to dawn upon him that he is dealing with a rather specialized and technical body of data or facts, which one must study with severe application and much astuteness if one is to be successful. That is the right road. Or Mr. A may make up his mind that handicapping is nonsense—the sort he has been attempting to indulge in most certainly is—and try to turn himself into a one-man detective agency to learn what horse is "meant" in the next race. He may burn out his eyes and wear out his pencil and program in following the flow of money to this horse or that horse in a race; he may hang around trainers and jockeys avidly awaiting words of wisdom; he may become a sleuth retained by himself to discover that horse which is going to win the next race. But if he takes this road he is doomed, and unless the ultimate instinct for self-preservation steers him away from the tracks he will end by getting his horses from bartenders, barbers and bootblacks.

A racing novice is apt to become skeptical of the value of handicapping from past performances as a basis for successful play. His own ability to figure fields for win­ners is so limited that he often accepts as winners ap­parent cinch horses that more often than not lose at very short prices. These experiences lead him to doubt the value of handicapping. And his own doubt of the value of handicapping prevents his making any conscientious and serious attempt to master the art, so that his figuring of fields becomes more and more slipshod and less ac­curate every time he undertakes the operation.

And yet novices infected with this basic doubt of the possibility of grading fields of horses will turn to the opin­ions of public selectors for guidance and attempt to evolve workable systems of play based on their choices. Of course all this is the height of folly. If a man can't get winners on his own because horses run so unpredictably that no one can get winners with any regularity, why assume that the so-called experts are any better? Yet thousands of horse players in the United States daily are playing and checking on systems based on the opinions of public selectors. None of these methods ever does work, except for brief and wholly accidental periods, and none of them ever can work consistently. Each single expert or the con­sensus of opinion of any group of experts will put one on too many losers out of each hundred bets to permit any net profit from successful transactions. And each one of them, at least once during a year, will run into a streak of losers so prolonged as to prohibit the successful em­ployment of any scheme of progressive betting involving an increased wager after a loss.

Unless a series of horses wagered on flat, with the same amount of money on each, shows some net profit or only a trifling loss, no progressive scheme of betting can be applied to the same animals at the same prices that will have the effect of materially increasing the profit or elimi­nating the loss from flat play. This is an undeniable fact. Yet novices will continue to erect progressive systems on the choices of individual public selectors or groups of public selectors that always show a loss from flat play.

A reader need not accept my word that flat play on the choices of any selector consistently results in loss. A monthly turf magazine in each issue carries a depart­ment showing the results of $2 straight fiat play on the choices of all the selectors employed by the racing sheets and of a few others having a national circulation. These figures are developed in two divisions, first, for whole-card selections; second, for best bets. Figures for favorites also are included in the whole-card section. In this cate­gory all the selectors always show a loss from flat play over a period of a year; in fact post-favorites normally show less loss than any single selector. In the best-bet category one or two of the selectors occasionally show a profit of a few dollars from a couple of hundred or more $2 wagers. But all the others are in the loss column, and the one or two who have made money never repeat the following year.

Nothing can be done in betting on the shaky choices of a crew of phony "experts" whose selections often are so ridiculous that they are laughable. And yet the novice public and the sucker public—two groups that are not the- same although they overlap—will persist in following these people to their own financial doom. The public knows it can't pick winners and seriously doubts whether anyone can pick winners. Yet, for lack of anything bet­ter, it turns to the selectors at a first cost of a few cents for the paper and a final cost of a good many millions of dollars. Remember this: if, at a race track, you see a man with his eyes glued to the selections in a daily newspaper or to the selectors' page in a racing sheet instead of to the past performance records of the horses, then you are privileged to gaze upon a simon-pure novice in the flesh, with all his frailties about him. And even if he is looking, at the past performance records for the field, he almost certainly is trying to make up his mind a few minutes before post time.

Merely to point out the great fallibility of public se­lectors' opinions on races is not enough. The most acute danger for a novice or anyone else who relies on these selectors is that he, they and the paper which publishes their stuff blandly ignore the great difference between playable and unplayable races. In each of the seven or eight races the selector has indicated his choices for first, second and third, 1, 2, 3, just like that, and there are the names so that he who runs—toward the poorhouse—may read.

But reasonably accurate handicapping procedures may reveal that any single race is so close between two or three horses that it is quite impossible to make any solid choice. Racing around oval courses is full of possibilities of acci­dent and upset. A particular horse may be left at the post or break slowly. He may be blocked through getting penned in on the rail so that he is unable to run freely. He may be bumped and knocked off stride. He may be interfered with in the stretch. With any one of these, acci­dents liable to occur in any race, it is mere nonsense to try to work out some single horse as best by a very nar­row margin; for that margin can be nullified by some slight accident, like the horse's having to run all the way on the outside (hence farther than the others).

A selector's choices for a card from first' race to last set a series of traps for novices who are ignorant and vet­erans who are innocent. A player has merely the names of the selected horses in any race to go on; he can't tell whether any single race figures as impossibly close be­tween two or more horses unless he is a handicapper in his own right and has spent some time in analyzing past performances. And if he is a handicapper and has an­alyzed the past performances he has no need for the opinions of the selector.

To point out all these matters about the procedures of novices is only to re-phrase, re-iterate and re-emphasize the truth that they do not know what it is all about. Either they must stumble about blindly, lighting on this horse or that by pure chance, or else they must rely just as blindly on the judgment of someone else who is posing as an expert. In either event they inevitably will lose money in the long run to the take and breakage of the mutuel machines. The only way for anyone to avoid that is to wager on a sufficient proportion of horses whose prices constitute overlays, and a novice can't even define an overlay correctly, far less detect it.

I have been glancing over the field of selectors' opin­ions, particularly in relation to the chances of novices and others who tend to rely heavily upon them. The next point that should be examined is the novice's tendency to be­come a straight, place and show bettor rather than one who wagers to win only. Or he may start to bet win and place, win and show, place and show or show or place only.

After a very brief time at the tracks it begins to dawn on him that it is not easy but difficult to get winners. It is hard to get them on his own, and it seems to be just as hard to get them by following selectors. So it is en­tirely natural that he should reason that he will have a better chance for profit if he "insures" all straight bets by wagering also farther back, or if he abandons straight betting altogether and wagers place or show or both posi­tions in combination.

All race track reasoning of this sort is utterly false be­cause it considers only the factor of percentage of bets that can be won and ignores the factor of price, which is just as influential on the issue of financial success as is the percentage of winning single bets secured.

In the mutuels horses pay only a fraction of their nat­ural odds to place or to show, such natural odds being represented by a fraction whose numerator is the total of money bet against their chances of finishing in the par­ticular position, its denominator being the amount bet on them for that position. I will go into this matter more fully later on,4 but the fact is that place and show prices on a horse are so much lower than his price to win, in the" ? average case, that one who wagers place and/or show as a practice is giving away in prices far more than he gains in percentage of bets won, in comparison with straight play.

4 See Chapter 7, Section III, How to Bet.

Of course a good handicapper can win more place bets in a hundred or a thousand than he could while betting. straight, and of course he can win more show bets than place bets. But his average prices on place bets and show bets that win will be so much lower than his average price on winning straight bets that after a year or two an analysis of the several hundred wagers almost certain­ly will demonstrate two things, each leading to the same conclusion: (1) if money has been made over the period by betting place or show, more money would have been made by wagering the same amounts on identically the same horses, but to win only; (2) if money has been lost over the period by place or show betting, then less money ; would have been lost by wagering the same amounts on identically the same horses, but to win only. In other words, place and/or show betting, whether independently or in conjunction with win betting, is a style of play effec­tive neither in minimizing losses nor in increasing profits.

Please remember that in making these statements I am referring to results attainable by a good handicapper, not a mere random stabber whose play reveals no underlying principle if it is scrutinized.

The more common erroneous procedures of novices have been covered in discussing their tendency to rely on public selectors and their tendency to veer toward place and show betting as they become convinced by ex­perience of the difficulty of figuring winners for them­selves or getting them from anyone else, whether friends, casual acquaintances, tip-sheets, touts or newspaper se­lectors.

Let me revert to the matter of public selectors. None of them is successful, in the sense of showing a profit from flat play on all of his choices. And even if one of them did become abnormally successful, securing so high a per­centage of winners that betting his choices flat would re­sult in profit, it would not take two weeks for him to at­tract a public following so heavy that the weight of money on his horses would send them to post at prices short enough to insure loss from wagering on them in any way.

There is no easy money at the tracks. A novice had bet­ter attempt to wear through his novitiate by studying handicapping and betting on paper. Not until he can get about forty winners in each hundred attempts, and can get them at prices close to 2/1 or higher, should a new­comer to the game go to a track and reach for his wallet. And when he has become as good as the figures just given indicate he can know that he is just as good as any horse-player in this world ever has been or ever will be.

Another fatal practice of novices consists in betting horses in varying rather than in flat amounts suited to the player's available resources. If this bettor wins a wager, too often he becomes unduly flushed with success and bets more on the next horse—which promptly obliges by los­ing. Or he may reverse the process. After a loss, and par­ticularly after a succession of losses, he may become un­duly timid and bet substantially less on the next horse— which may win. But the win will do the bettor very little good in recouping prior losses because of the limited amount on the horse. Whether they win or lose money over a period depends primarily upon whether their larger bets win or go down. And that is entirely a matter of chance.

Still another almost certainly fatal practice of novices and sucker players is to bet relatively large amounts on horses they feel are certain to win and relatively smaller amounts on horses of whose chances they are not quite so confident. If this is done the player has no chance of success whatever. The player's smaller bets, on animals re­garded by him as much more chancy because the odds say they are, may yield some good prices. But these good prices will not be influential toward success on the whole string of wagers because the amounts bet were so small.

What has been said in this chapter does not begin to exhaust the examples of senseless betting by novices and plain suckers at and away from the tracks. But I have taken up in turn their tendency to follow public selectors on newspapers and scratch-sheets, if not something worse like tipsters and touts; their tendency to back horses place and/or show as well as straight; and their tendency to wager in variant instead of the same amounts.

All these errors result from false reasoning, when any reasoning at all by the player has been involved. The tendency to follow selectors, scratch-sheets, tipsters or touts in its simplest terms means that the player will ac­cept anyone as an expert because he knows that he him­self is not one. The tendency to back horses otherwise than to win only, is the result of a false conservatism that looks only to the bare winning of a bet rather than to what can be expected from winning some bets over a period and losing more. The tendency to wager in variant amounts results from the player's thought that he can pick his spots and bet heavily when the particular animal is almost certain to win, lightly when there is considerable risk in the transaction. And here also the basic reasoning is infantile. If the player can pick sure things with pre­cision and more or less constantly, he should confine his betting to such situations.

I have said nothing here about various other manias of novice players, such as if-money bets, including reverse and back-to-back bets, as well as parlays. All wagers of these types spring from a desire to make one dollar do the work of two or five, and practically all such operations are foredoomed to failure over a period. But they are indulged In by small bettors away from the tracks rather than by players on-course, and this book is written chiefly for the man or woman who bets at the tracks in a fairly substantial way.

Possibly the propensity of some players to bet jockeys rather than horses should be mentioned. Very occasion­ally some boy who is "hot" at the time will show a profit from backing all his mounts at a single race meeting, but betting on riders rather than mounts never has proved profitable over a period to anyone that I ever heard of.

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