The nervous and emotional tension apt to be generated in an individual visiting a race track to make bets, renders him vulnerable to impulses which may be inimical to his chances for success. He has come to the course to try to make money, but in the aver­age case has no well-defined idea of how to attain that end. Even if he has worked out a plan of operations, it is improbable that he will have enough confidence in it to permit averages to develop if the scheme gets off on the wrong foot and a high percentage of losing transactions is experienced. The natural thing for any man to do in such circumstances is to dump the method overboard and either try another or quit the game entirely. Usually a particular individual starts another method, however silly or however simple, even though he actually follows it for only one or two races. He would be far wiser to quit the game, at least until he has formulated some betting plan that has merit and until he has courage enough to carry it through bad streaks.

No man can escape his own mind, free himself of its weaknesses and accentuate its strengths. He is what he is, and heads for a lot of grief by becoming interested in horses and betting if he knows little about either and is also timid and vacillating. His timidity will insure his pre­mature abandonment of a good method, even if he stumbles upon one, for no method of betting can always: successful. Any method, or any handicapper, is bound run into bad streaks; a timid bettor is constitutionally i: capable of carrying through such a bad streak to a better day. He will quit when the going gets rough, like a quit­ting horse or a quitting boxer, take up some other line of approach to success, and quit that too as soon as the in­evitable bad streak happens along.

In the usual case the professional bettor, who has a long experience of relative success through wagering on horses of his own choice, is the only person at the tracks who has the least chance to make money. He does not think he is good; he knows he has been able to beat them for years—a supposedly impossible feat—and therefore he knows he is good. He is not shaken to the core when two to ten bets go down in a line. He knows before he starts that he will lose at least six out of ten of his wagers, and he knows that the sequence of winners and losers will not follow any definite pattern, week after week and month after month. He knows that he may get an unusually large number of winners in June, for instance, and an equally large number of losers in July. He knows that he is al­most certain to run through a streak of consecutive losers once or twice a year. But he also knows that the financial losses of any such streak will be overcome by a following streak of winners, or by two or three winners at extra-long prices. He has confidence in himself because he does not think or hope that his handicapping is good enough to beat the game; he knows that it is. "

The confident, hard-boiled, almost indifferent attitude of a successful bettor in facing the loss or profit from any single wager, or from any sequence of wagers, is violently "in contrast with the attitude of a novice or a sucker of even ten years' experience at the tracks. The novice has nothing at all except hope; the sucker has always money at the tracks, not every day or week, but cert every year. Each lacks any successful experience; conse­quently each adopts more radically different procedures in the course of a month's betting than could be described by three expert observers writing shorthand.

These points are obvious, but let me elaborate them a little.

A man goes to the track. He has a few dollars and he hopes to make some money. So he starts in with the first race and buys a $2 ticket. Whether the neat little bit of cardboard is straight, place or show is immaterial. Say the bet wins and the ticket is cashed. The chap buys a ticket on the second race, and again he cashes it. He feels he is in for a good day so he raises his sights and buys a $5 straight ticket. The horse wins, and he pockets a nice pay-off. Being well out in front, he buys a $10 place ticket on the fourth race, and cashes it at something like a respectable mutuel. Then, not being very sure of the fifth race, he buys a show ticket, $2 denomination, on the horse he prefers, and cashes that one also, the horse in fact win­ning. In the sixth race he takes a horse to win, because his choice won the fifth, but bets only $2 because he feels he should be conservative and protect the profit already in his pocket, and the horse does win. He is not sure of the seventh race, buys a $2 show ticket, and the horse runs out. At the end of the day he buys a show ticket on the eighth race, $2 again, and again the horse runs out. But the player does not mind. In fact he feels rather elated, for normally a $2 bettor unless he gets ahead early in the afternoon, he has made unusual profits for him.

But what are the facts in this operation that are either patent or latent? I am not going to point out that this player could have made more money by betting more money. He hit practically the entire card, in one way or another, so of course this result would have followed. What I am going to point out is that his success with his first two bets led him to bet more on the third and fourth races, which yielded most of his day's profit. And I am also going to point out that if he had lost the first two bets he would almost certainly have been influenced- tdv stick to $2 wagers, so that he would have won materially less than when encouraged by his first two winning bets.

What the man could make depended only on how much he bet on horses that ran as he bet them, in view of their prices and how much he played on the two that lost. It was utterly immaterial whether he started with two win­ners and wound up with two losers, as he did, or whether he started with two losers and wound up by winning bets on the six following races. By. assumption—one I have seen happen five hundred times at the tracks—the bettor required the thrill of quick and early success to raise his level of betting. Probably two losers at the beginning would have resulted in his going home with nominal profits from $2 betting even though he had the whole card after the second race.

This is what I mean by novice or sucker betting, emo­tional betting, or even call it human betting, it is so uni­versal. But it is not calculated professional betting, very far from it. The order in which winners and losers happen to come means nothing to a cold-blooded professional and does not affect his level of play either upward or down­ward. He is backing his judgment to develop a percentage of winners at an average price that will put him ahead over a period, and he knows that no averages that mean anything can result from bets whose amounts are de­termined by the flush of previous success or the disap­pointment of previous loss.

To develop into a bettor of the professional type an in­dividual must have a record of success with real money that will give him the necessary self-confidence. I doubt if any amount of playing on paper will do that

One type of novice or sucker player is the fellow who needs two wins to hazard more than his normal wager.

Another and even worse type is the bettor who puts $5 on this horse, $20 on that, possibly only $2 on the next, and yet cannot bear the thought of leaving the track any single day with a loss. Say he is out $62 after the fifth race. He begins plunging, not so much to make money on the day as to pull out even. He may be thirty years old, with an­other thirty or forty years at the tracks ahead of him, but the immediate necessity is to get back in the last three races what he has lost in the preceding five. So he begins to bet relatively small amounts on long-shots or relatively large amounts on favorites. More often than not the re­sult is to send him home a heavier loser than he would have been had he quit when the quitting was good, at the point when his losses began to hag-ride him.

All these loss-producing variations in play have their roots in the mental make-up of the individual bettor. If he becomes elated with success, however temporary, he will over-bet after a win. If he becomes depressed by fail­ure, however temporary, he will under-bet after a loss.

The same psychological influences produce betting that is erratic not only as to amount but also as to the posi­tions of the horses. A player may make one or two wagers to place, see the horse win, and make his next bet to win only. More often than not that animal will place, show or run out of the money. Then the player will back his next selection to show, only to see him win. This pathetic whip-sawing of the bettor who has no confidence in himself, and really does not know what he is doing or why he is doing it, will continue until he is broke and automatically cured.

Few players who go to the tracks as grass-green novices have the least fore-knowledge of how heavily their suc­cess or failure will be influenced by the psychological fac­tors I have been discussing. Before they subject themselves to the emotional strains and stresses of actual betting, it is merely a matter of picking a horse, straight, place or show, and of seeing lima do it or not do it in the n paper's result chart. But" when they are putting up money from a real roll that certainly is not unlimited, they?; become the prey of many psychological factors generated:* within themselves. They have no external armor of ex­perience and equipment, and no internal armor of cour­age. Their own vacillation destroys them even more quick­ly than the mutuel take would if they had nerve and the'; gambler's temperament, though not his specialized knowl­edge.

No one can hope to resist these pushes and pulls be­tween different amounts for play and different positions to be played unless he has adopted some definite style of betting which he knows has been successful for him over a really prolonged period. If he is so fortunate (very few ever are), and if he has a good gambler's tempera-; ment (very few do), then he ought to have the confidence to stick to his method of play through the rough spots as well as the smooth. -4ncl there is some chance he will do so if he has any sense. But it seems that few horse-players possess horse-sense. However competently they may han­dle the ordinary problems of life, they seem to fall under some peculiar spell when they go to the track or bet any­where. I have heard the silliest trash about horses, handi­capping, systems and methods of play babbled by men who could take their opponent's eyeteeth in a business deal without half trying. Away from the track they are com­petent, smooth and tough; at the track they often exhibit no sense at all.

I attribute the "public's dependence upon selectors to the fact that the average player knows perfectly well he-is not a good handicapper. He gets too few winners. The grandstand crowds that keep the game going by admission fees and losses to the take are so devoid of confidence that they take their horses from tip-sheets, touts, friends or anyone else, and abandon any particular source of information and any method of play as soon as they have wagered on two losers.

In writing in this way I am not trying to be funny, smart, or caustic. No honest book on betting can fail to warn readers that a plunge into the stresses of the tracks is like a plunge into a whirlpool. No ordinary person can hope to make headway against the conflicting currents, unless he has made himself a first-class handicapper and knows he is such because he has beaten them.

The mental pull away from some style of betting that has failed temporarily, is an intrinsic part of the human mind just because it is a mind. From earliest infancy we learn by experience. If a baby touches a hot stove and is burned, pain will force upon him realization that he must not handle that big, strange, black monster he later will call a stove. If he gets hold of a knife and cuts himself, he will be conservative about knives. Every man and woman has learned in infancy that it pays to keep away from things that hurt. A player of horses who has made two bets to win and lost them both, and makes his next wager to place or to show, is following a pattern of re­action from hurt. And he must continue to do so, to vacillate from one style of betting to another until he exercises that higher degree of consciousness involved in the reasoning process and realizes that he must not feel every single losing transaction as a hurt to be recoiled from.

Perhaps this is all rather abstract for a book on betting. But it is an accurate analysis of the psychological factor underlying the vacillation of an inexpert player straining to win every single bet he makes. If only he would get into his head that he must lose substantially more bets than he can hope to win, that he must rely for profit over a period on respectable prices from the fewer winners, then he would be substituting reason for instinct, and would have some chance of success.

I think that almost all horse-players of little experience and less success will admit that their greatest fault has been extreme vacillation between different ways of getting horses to bet and different ways of betting them once they have been secured. I know that in a certain period of my own life I was shifting my style of play from race to race, with the usual lamentable results. I had no more judgment than a chicken with its head off, and went veering from horse to horse, style of betting to style of betting, selection-method to selection-method, until I wound up with a most acute realization that I had been acting like a congenital idiot. For I knew better. I was a good handicapper, but I had been pressing too hard for a winner in every race I played, accepted too many horses at short prices, and won very little when I did win. If a bet or two, made straight, failed to win, I tried to remedy the situation by backing the next few horses to show, with the usual result of winning very little in good streaks of two or three weeks and then going into a nose dive when I couldn't get a horse in the money to save my life. Or, after a good streak of horses bet to show which in fact won, I stepped up my play to bet them straight, where­upon they immediately obliged by running second, third or out of the money.

I myself have been through every vicissitude of following the horses. The only depth of horse-nonsense that I have not plumbed is to take animals for play from public se­lectors. The reason for that is simple. I was brought up under the eye of a first-class trainer, veterinarian and handicapper, and from him got sound instruction on esti­mating a field of horses. He was my mother's father, Dr. Robert Saunders, and it pleases me to burn a little in­cense to his memory here.

A man who is betting horses to make money, not just to have fun, or who plans to bet them for profit, should realize that his own personality will thrust him toward failure or success. The more definitely he can divorce him­self from instinctive reactions against unsuccessful single wagers, the more surely he can accept losses with equa­nimity, provided that his basic procedures are sound and that he is convinced of the fact.

No one can win all his bets. The more cheerfully a player accepts that fact the more surely he will prevent loss of a few bets from causing him to alter his methods.

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