Thanks, Tony! Very insightful.

Maybe have a rule that after a pre-race cutoff time, wagers would be limited to, say, $500. If an individual is found to have violated the provision, their wagers would be held and invalidated. Tracks need to take such a measure, but I seriously doubt they ever will. They probably like those last second huge wagers.

Another route to State Planning is that he was coming off a Scott Big Win, being close at the 2nd call 26 days ago and drawing off in the win. I have his specific pattern to be a 23% win probability, quite high.

I am concerned about exclusive ADW's. It can give insight into information such as wagering unintentionally not being closed. An ADW should, in my opinion, be independent of those who wager and should be available to the public. Maybe certify a number of separate clients -- like maybe 1,000 or something, with provisions for a startup.

While the last second wagering is very detrimental to the sport, I don't really know what to do about it. This person made 13 wagers in 40 seconds, so even limiting the size of a wager after a cutoff time has potential loopholes.

I think the issue becomes how many other races point to CHAOS and what percentage of them actually produced a chaotic winner? — Dave Schwartz

True. As I indicated, I still regard my process as a work in progress. I was able to quickly find the example above, but that very well could be luck.

Okay, I read the blog post. My apologies... I did not know you have a chaos product.

I have not read that blog post, but I will.

Conversely, one could just pass the potential chaos races so that more traditional approaches might prevail.

I went looking for an example race and so I am posting the first one that looks remotely like what I am talking about. By the way, I should also explain that I am not looking for a horse that has a late side %M. I am looking for a RACE with a late side %M.

If you can, look at today's (3/31) AQU race 5.

I have the M%M running styles as E, SP, S, P, SP, SP, SP (in this case, those are generally fairly close to the published positional running styles, but that is not always the case). That yields a 3.57 mean running style, a potential chaos race (over 3.2).

Keep the horses that have recently been closers... 3, 4, 5, 6.

Drop the 5 based on too many Quirin points, 4, leaving the 3, 4 and 6.

Based on traditional handicapping, drop the 6, leaving the 3 and 4.

The 3 bobbled at the start and was never a factor.

The positions of the 4 were 6 - 4 - 2 - 1.

4 wins at 7.2 /1 in a 7 horse field, paying $16.40.

And, as per Dave's suggestion, the even money favorite finished 2nd, with the $1 exacta paying $25.25.

It is imperative that we identify when such a race is LIKELY to happen because to swing for the fences in every race is to subject ourselves to a gigantic number of losers. — Dave Schwartz

Absolutely true.

I welcome any suggestions on better ways to locate chaos races.

'Some men see things as they are and say why, I dream things that never were and say, why not' – George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)

Most people look at 20/1 winners and say that they only happen very rarely, so why bother? I look at those races as untapped potential.

JRand and Rich Val,

You are correct that most races have a significant component in positional running style. And, today, most serious pace handicappers do acknowledge the positional component.

But, there are a few races where positional running completely breaks down into chaos. There is no doubt that chaos races do exist. I'm not suggesting this is an every race approach. I still look at published running style and a running style I learned from a prominent handicapper (CJ). I like to look at factors from many angles, searching for a "false positive". When fractional times tell us that the positions could easily blow up, for me that is a false positive on the positional approach.

So, when is positional handicapping likely to break down? When pretty much none of the horses has the early ability to maintain a normal early pace. That's what I am saying.

Just imagine that you have to actually watch EVERY SINGLE RACE to pull the trigger. — Dave Schwartz

My state does not allow ADW's anymore. Are conditional wagers still available? Odds of 11/1 or more are probably not going to drop significantly in the last seconds, are they?

Dave, I have created a new topic. You may delete it from this thread if you wish. I don't think I know how to delete a post here.

I've done some research that is a little bit similar.

Most serious researchers probably know that chaos races are easy to spot after the fact, but not quite so easy beforehand. Well, I think chaos ensues when none of the horses in the race really want to exert early energy. But I define that a little differently from most folks. I am only talking about dirt racing because grass tends to be late more often than dirt.

Sartin followers are probably familiar with %M (percent median). It shows in which part of a race a horse exerts energy, early or late. I believe this is the true running style of the horse. But, from which race? I think all of them. Huh? I take the median of all of the %M's available and refer to it as M%M.

Through a little research, I split the M%M figures into somewhat equal categories and those are my E, E/P, P, P/S, S and L running styles.

I then assign numbers to those 6 running styles, 1 for E down to 6 for L.

Then I average the running style numbers for all of the horses in the race. So, a typical race will be somewhere around 2.0 to 3.0.

So, when that race running style is high (at least 3.2), I find the race becomes more likely to be chaotic. Why? I think it is because some horse or horses are called on to atypically expend early energy and that is not what they are accustomed to doing and the other horses try to keep up and many tire. You end up with a horse that has relatively poor speed figures winning the race coming from off the pace... chaos.

So, which horse wins? I find that it is often a horse with low Quirin speed points and has shown an ability to close in recent races, in position and/or lengths, preferably both. Yes, even if it only went from 9th to 4th or even 5th to 4th. Not backing up is the key.

Admittedly this is somewhat theoretical at this point. I haven't fully proven it. And, I am still looking for more criteria as to when to utilize it.

It should be noted that my running styles are often much different from published running styles. In my opinion, the published styles tend to be better correlated to position rather than fractional speed.

Also, this often does not work when there is a clearly superior horse in the race.

Any thoughts?

Interesting, Dave. What is PSR? I don't necessarily mean specifically, but is that a speed number of some sort?

We need this place to work because PA is dead and there really isn't anywhere else. — Darren

I agree. I'll try to do better, too. We need more discussion on the serious aspects of handicapping.

I moved my comment to a different thread.

Yeah, Tony, I have lots more from the old days, but I'm with you on hoping those days are gone. Sometimes it was more efficient to just pay attention than to actually handicap. lol

Okay, I've seen some weird things at the track, but this may be the strangest. Again, Delta Downs many years ago.

A casual friend tells me, hey, you hear that announcement? For the car with the lights on? There's no car with the lights on. That's a code for the winner. Arrange the horses by morning line odds, then bet the first three digits of the license number. Well, that sounded pretty far fetched, so I didn't buy in. But the guy goes to the window and comes back and shows me a cold trifecta on the three horses.

The race is run and it is the right three horses, but the wrong sequence. "PLEASE HOLD ALL TICKETS. THERE HAS BEEN A STEWARD'S INQUIRY." May have been an objection, don't remember, long time ago. A horse's butt swung a little wide going into the first turn, not severely. This happens in nearly every race, but in this one they DQ the horse and now my buddy has the winning trifecta.

As if that wasn't enough, the payoff was $580, just below the IRS threshold. I have no idea if it was true, but there were always rumors that in this type case they punched up tickets after the race to bring the payout down below the IRS level.

So, to this day I have no idea of whether this guy was pulling my leg and got lucky. But it was certainly mighty suspicious, especially with the DQ going his way.