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Handicapping for Better or Worse: A Fresh Perspective to Betting the Races
This bettor's guide to handicapping racehorses teaches horse players how to use all the available information to form their own system. Explains the advantages and drawbacks in current popular handicapping methods.
- GenresHorse Racing
224 pages, Hardcover
First published April 25, 2004
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About the author
John Lindley
1 bookLibrarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
February 14, 2015
I enjoy reading about handicapping, and I hadn’t read a handicapping book for a few years, so I picked this one up. Written in 2004, this one had an interesting organization. The first part of the book was really about the use of statistics and measurements and the “tools” created from them, like speed figures and track biases. In this part, Lindley shows how handicappers can treat each horse like an interchangeable entity that is quantified based on his or her numbers. In his descriptions of these tools he continually points out the weaknesses in them, to the point that after the first part of the book, you start to think maybe buying tip sheets at the track isn’t a bad way to go. Do not be surprised here – the author writes tip sheets. The second part of the book takes what seems to be the opposite tact, which is to treat each horse as an individual. Lindley suggests taking many things into account when choosing a horse and a bet, including the dullness of their coat, their last workouts, habits of the trainer and jockey, history of the owner, and many, many more. By the end of this part, you feel like Lindley has made a very good case against part time handicapping, and against betting when not actually at the track. Again, this is certainly an interesting list of things to think about, but there is no magic bullet provided, and it only goes to make the case to buy tip sheets from the handicappers that live at the track you are betting, the ones that can, for instance, check that the workout clockers are getting good readings. The last section has articles that I believe are reprints from magazines on betting strategy and one on the ill use of “statistics”. Strangely, he makes the case that odd things can happen during a race so you can’t count on statistics. I found this strange because the statistics he is talking about enter into a lot of the measurements in the first section of the book – he appears to be undermining the validity of that entire section. I'm not sure ending a handicapping book with a discourse on the high impact of luck is good for the book, but Lindley does it, perhaps to dissuade the casual bettor. He seems to be saying that handicapping well is a job for professionals.
I appreciated that Lindley is a horse owner and claimer, and many of the hints he gave were strategies he had used to choose horses. Large parts of the middle section of the book talk about how to pick out a horse that will perform well after the race has started – good for claimers, not immediately useful for bettors. Other handicapping books I’ve read did not have that “angle”, and it amounted to a substantial amount of what he wrote about. It’s almost as if he described the basics and then wrote about the hundreds of cases where the basics were not exactly correct. His stories were the highlights of the book, though, and his perspective as an owner was very interesting for this kind of book. He also had a nice, thoughtful article on whether horses know when they’ve won a race.
On the flip side, a lot of the conjecture in the book can be empirically tested, but the author did not do so. For example, he stated his belief that horses in a “non-winning” streak are not necessarily less likely to win their next race. Horse racing has a long history of kept statistics and measurements. In this era of big data, this kind of question can actually be answered, not just conjectured about. This might be one of the last books about handicapping that doesn’t appear to have any data massaged by computer.
I appreciated that Lindley is a horse owner and claimer, and many of the hints he gave were strategies he had used to choose horses. Large parts of the middle section of the book talk about how to pick out a horse that will perform well after the race has started – good for claimers, not immediately useful for bettors. Other handicapping books I’ve read did not have that “angle”, and it amounted to a substantial amount of what he wrote about. It’s almost as if he described the basics and then wrote about the hundreds of cases where the basics were not exactly correct. His stories were the highlights of the book, though, and his perspective as an owner was very interesting for this kind of book. He also had a nice, thoughtful article on whether horses know when they’ve won a race.
On the flip side, a lot of the conjecture in the book can be empirically tested, but the author did not do so. For example, he stated his belief that horses in a “non-winning” streak are not necessarily less likely to win their next race. Horse racing has a long history of kept statistics and measurements. In this era of big data, this kind of question can actually be answered, not just conjectured about. This might be one of the last books about handicapping that doesn’t appear to have any data massaged by computer.
February 18, 2014
Handicapping remains a mystery to me. This is fortunate, I suppose. It is better to find this lesson out through books than at the OTB.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews