In the eighth chapter I had something to say about the amazing vacillations in play produced by the mental pressure generated by race tracks. The matter of self-control, now to be discussed, does not involve quite the same factors. A player may be cool and quite free from any such pressure and yet make so many foolish bets in the course of a season as to affect seriously the net profit he secures from logically worked-out wagers.'

Take the case of a good bettor, meaning a good handi-capper and a good locator of price-spots, who often buys several tickets in the daily double pool sold on the first two races. Sometimes, of course, the daily double pays a tremendous return on a successful $2 ticket, but that is the case only when the winner of each race was very light­ly regarded. Probably the holders of winning tickets are composed chiefly of persons who "bought the rack," i.e., covered every possible contingency by coupling each horse in the first race with all the horses in the second, at con­siderable outlay of money, gambling that the pay-off thus secured would be greater than the investment. But in the average case doubles do not pay much where each of the winners really figured to come in first, and to make a long story short if not sweet it is as impossible to beat the horses on doubles as it is on parlays.

A competent bettor who is at the track to wager $10, $50 or $100 on his selections in two or three playable races is throwing away part of his profits if he plays dou­bles even if only for the fun of it. He is making unsound wagers for no valid reason, and to that extent, lacks self-control.

Another player who lacks self-control bets a fairly sub­stantial amount on races he regards as really playable but bets a smaller amount on other races merely to have something riding. Even if he is a $500 or $1,000 bettor on events that he likes, and rides only $2 on races he does not like, the only effect of the small sporting bets will be to whittle down profits from the larger ones.

Of course a player has a perfect right to bet his own money on his own choices whether he is doing so for fun or in expectation of profit. But a man who does not steel himself against temptation to wage on cheap or unpick-able races leaves a hole in his armor that may enlarge and ultimately render him too loose a player to be a suc­cessful one. The most valuable quality that a chronic visitor to the tracks can cultivate is ability to pass bad races and merely look on without betting. A player of whole cards is doomed before he starts; and a serious player who bets smaller amounts on bad races just to get action, can only injure his profits from the sizable wagers. A few $2 or $5 bets on shaky horses that manage to win at extra-long prices may tempt him into betting heavily on a number of horses of the same type that will finish up the course to the destruction of all his net profits for months.

The non-racing public has a general conception of the tracks as rowdy sinks of gambling where the most suc­cessful players are the biggest crooks and Lady Luck is the presiding divinity. Certainly no one ever presents the tracks as imposing the most rigorous self-discipline in the world as a fixed condition of avoiding financial execu­tion. Yet that is the fact. No monastic order, no army and no navy in the history of the world, has ever exacted penalties so great as do the tracks from any player who deviates by a hairsbreadth from the straight line of correct and logical procedure. To be successful a player of horses must control every whim and impulse while walking a slender _' wire from his starting point of reasoned probability to his \ ultimate goal of actual achievement. If he loses poise and balance for a moment he is lost.

A player should try to make himself realize before be­ginning to bet at all that the business of getting winners and picking price-spots is only half his task. He must also develop and exercise the self-control without which his handicapping ability cannot possibly operate in his favor. If, through inability to remain inactive, he often plays races that he should pass, he will fail to make any money. If he starts at a certain level of play but is frightened by a few successive losers into cutting the amounts he bets, then again he will fail to make money, and probably will also fail to get back what he has lost. If he lets a few long-priced winners tempt him into a radical increase in scale of play without adequate reserves to sustain it if losses -come along, as they most surely wilt, then he will also fail to make money. I could give a hundred more examples of conduct that will block success, from starting to play place because horses bet straight have been placing, to wagering the whole roll on the last race of the day in an effort to pull out ahead. It would be tiresome because I already have said a good deal about such matters. But the points are highly important to any player's chances for success.

A cool, contained and controlled player, with adequate knowledge of racing, is the only one with any chance at all for success at the tracks. Yet look at the herd of people pouring into each course on any day, lured by the dream of an easy dollar plus the thrill of yelling when the horses are in the stretch. Not one-tenth has any more than the vaguest notion of how to get a winner, but all plan to play down the card and pull out ahead or know the reason why. Only a handful make any money over a period, and the great majority go to the cleaner's without the remotest idea of the reason why. Ten years later some of them will still be stating flatly that the races can't be beaten. They know that, for they tried and failed.

A man who goes to the track with a plan theoretically sound, after having checked the type of play on paper or with small bets until he is convinced that it will work, is the only one who has the slightest chance of coming out ahead. He must have backbone enough and character enough to stick to his plan without deviation through bad streaks and good. The plan must involve straight betting primarily, with only a minor infusion of place betting if any at all, and it must involve flat wagering. This is to say indirectly that a really good plan will make maximum demands on its operator's self-control and fortitude. Every­one knows that it is hard to make money by betting straight in flat amounts, and occasions will be frequent when a player must show real courage in standing by his guns and battling it out. The real fact about the race tracks is that whatever seems hardest is best, and that whatever seems easiest is worst. The superficial view is that since it is easiest to win single show bets it ought to be easiest to make money by betting a thousand successive horses to show. The hard fact is that it is impossible to make money over a period by show betting because of the heavy cuts in natural profits occasioned not only by the mutuel take but also by the manner of computing show prices, involving deduction from the net show pool after the take has been sliced off the total of all money bet on the first, second and third horses before the remainder is divided between them. It not only seems hard but it is hard to get the best horse in a race, the one that should win it. Yet getting winners, and betting winners is the only way to make any money over a period of time.

To return to our muttons—any player who would succeed must keep his head amid the turmoil of the tracks and have guts enough to carry through, without deviation, along the lines of the method he has laid out in advance.

Are You Ready To Move Onto The Next Lesson? Click Here...