I was working with someone tonight on how to filter races in a study.

(HSH captures every race you bet, and every horse in the race. It tags contenders, probabilities, and a whole lot of stuff, so you can figure out what you're doing right or wrong.)

In this player's case, he wanted to learn how to do some basic filter so he could look at what his winners and losers looked like at different tracks, surfaces, distances, field sizes, etc.

Thought you guys might like to see what a winning amateur player can accomplish.

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First, we're looking at his last 715 races.


Even though I have helped this player with strategy in the past, he is 100% responsible for his success. I have only a vague idea about what he does.

What I KNOW to be true.

• As many of our more successful players do, he bets every race he handicaps.
• He does not make an odds line and bet into it.
• He does some form of dynamic handicapping.
• That means HSH fetches races from the database that are "like this one."
• Then HSH uses those races as a "model" to build objects to handicap with.
• He plays an average of 2 horses per race, sometimes more, sometimes less.

Here's what I believe to be true:

• He uses a module known as "How the Whales Should Bet."
• This module is NOT used to predict the odds.
• It is generally used to determine who the good bets should be.
• (Ironically, these are typically the horses who will win a lot of races and wind up losing 3-6%.)

How he actually handicaps is completely out of my scope of knowledge.

As I said to him when I recorded this video, the results are phenomenal.
BTW, the video was to show him how to filter the bets he's made to see how well he is doing in some types of races as opposed to others.
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In this graphic, we have "built a filter" (for teaching purposes) to isolate on races shorter than 1 mile.

As you can see, the results were highly similar, but the races played have dropped from 715 to 566. Obviously, distance is not an issue.

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Our user's typically use what we call Object Odds - an Artificial Morning Line object (aML).

This graphic shows that he's pretty much beating every odds range, and the sample sizes are respectable.

BTW, Object Odds are only available when you handicap one race at a time.
IOW, this was not some kind of robotic handicapping where a system is thrown against a database.

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In this image we see the Grades Breakdown.

In HSH, the grades are based upon the projected $net for each horse.
more specifically, $net is computed from:
Probability x Projected Odds

Although the actual grade levels are set by the user, generally A+ to A- are set to be profitable and everything below is projected to be losers, with F's being the absolute worst.

As you can see from looking at the table, the projected Best Bets were slight losers, but once again he did pretty well from top to bottom.

One thing worth noticing - Since he bets so many Grade F horses, there is obviously no Value Component in his approach.

I've taught a lot of players that in today's Era of the Whales value handicapping - making a line and betting into it - is pretty much dead.
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In this last screenshot, we see how the horses ranked for probability. Again, he was quite successful from top to bottom.

And, again, we can see that he is clearly not using the "best horses" to make his bets.

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FINALLY, I will share a little background about this player, who is very well-known in our community.

I recall a few years ago - maybe 6 years? - when he announced that after decades of losing, for the FIRST TIME IN HIS LIFE he did not have to refill his account at the end of the month.

Later he spoke of how it felt to have WON EIGHT MONTHS IN A ROW.

His win back then was nothing like this.
Oh, I've seen lots of guys with +20% ROIs over several thousand bets.
What I have never seen is $Nets like his across all spectrums.

He is not a professional player - not by a longshot - but what he has accomplished is damned impressive.