What's Your Favorite Dave Schwartz Product?
I used the logic (even before I had read the book) to break down certain aspects of handicapping a race, but will admit the book made me think about it more and even more finite aspects.
An example of how I did this was in how I assess favorites. I wanted to come up with a strategy of when to back or go against a favorite, which I termed strong and false favorites. I broke down the aspects of a horse I was using to gauge this assessment on... recency, win percentage, class, experience at or within 1/2 a furlong of the distance to see how each of these factors related to each favorite in my homemade-manually entered excel database.
"But wait, there's more!"
While I found modest success with strong/false (and further breaking false into false with no qualifiers, false with a qualifier - a qualifier being a horse in the field that met the metrics of a strong favorite, but wasn't the favorite). I wanted to make the criteria better... so I started to look at other aspects of the field, not just the favorite and developed a favorite likelihood factor (FLF). I ran other metrics of the field against my favorites (type of race, field size, jock, etc. - 7 in total). I found a fairly linear relation between win percentage and FLF in all categories - strong, false no qual, false with qual.
I again tweaked the process and established two other levels of "super favorites" using the same drill down and adding other factors.
Sadly, the file I had used to develop the impact values of all of those factors was on the hard drive of a laptop that died (I have since learned my lesson on backing up information), but assessing the favorite and FLF is the first thing on my "handicapping checklist".
I have used HTMA as well to break down other angles/approaches I have used, which really isn't too different that how HSH builds objects out of factors.