Handicapping Magic
Some Unabashedly Biased Notes On A Great New Book
by Charles Carroll
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I’d like to be the
first to tell you about the most important new handicapping book of the
century.With the century so young,
that could be either exaggeration or faint praise, but this book is going
to set the standard for the next decade.It
also happens to be written by of one of the most successful bettors I know.
I
have been with Michael Pizzolla when he has scored very large in the high-end
casinos of the Las Vegas Strip, where he lives and works, day-in, day-out,
year-round.If you read the earlier
article on “variance,” hopefully you know I’m clued to the subject, and
that on those occasions when I’m there with him, I am happy for
him, excited for him—but I am not inclined to be awe-struck,
because…well, because of variance.
But,
you know what?It’s like this every
time I’m with the guy.I know
he has had far bigger days, but I think two $1,500 exactas at different
tracks on the same day are rather nice, don’t you?I
also know that he has down days, and we have commiserated many times over
those miserable streaks of twenty or more losses when—if we had picked
Cigar against a field of maidens at Lubbock Downs—his rider would have
been dismounted signing autographs when the gates opened.He
once had a seagull fly in the face of his otherwise-winning pick in the
stretch at Aqueduct!Now that’s
bum racing luck.And that got me
thinking.
In
spite of my other inclinations, I’m actually quite superstitious.Michael
has very good days when I’m with him; he says he also has bad days,
but I’ve never seen them—so, maybe there’s an opportunity here—as a professional
good luck charm.Jimmy Stuart had
a six-foot rabbit; how about a six-foot rabbit’s foot?Unfortunately
for my new career aspirations, it’s not luck.And,
his book will show you exactly why.
When
we are together in one of the race books on the Strip, I’m very conscious
of the fact that I’m on vacation—Michael is working.I
‘m usually bleary-eyed from doing what you do in Las Vegas—I might
have handicapped for an hour—and I usually have enough sense to bet lightly
when I’m in that state (of mind; not Nevada).Michael,
on the other hand, is making his living.He
is placing aggressive bets and is in full concentration.This
is not a time when I want to distract him with small talk or casual conversations
about methodology
I
have, however, talked to the race book managers where he plays.I
won’t tell you exactly what these race book managers have told me on matters
of scale, but I will say that these professionals who have seen it all
hold him in very high esteem.He
is invariably described as an exceptional case—a standout—even among top
players.
Knowing
this, and the fact that he is a master of pace handicapping, I can’t tell
you how many times I’ve seen Michael make a decisive move and wanted to
say out of pure curiosity, “Hey!Michael!Exactly
what are you doing?What are you
thinking?How are you framing that
bet?”Well, patience finally paid
off.I didn’t know it, but the last
couple of times I was with him, he must have been writing The Book.
The
book is Handicapping Magic.
Michael
Pizzolla is a magician—literally—as well as an attorney, so the title covers
two of his enthusiasms.He has many
others, including Eastern Philosophy, so I won’t cop any easy jokes about
lawyers.
This
book is the culmination of the pace handicapping movement of the ‘80s and
‘90s, but far more than that.There
have already been some great Pace books but, like the developing stages
of most evolving theoretical paradigms, they have all been works-in-progress.
Michael
was, in fact, co-author of one of the most important, Pace Makes The
Race:An Introduction To The Sartin
Methodology, and he was a working and teaching member of the Sartin
cartel.I have now met many of the
key players who were either in or around this legendary group, and aside
from a certain weirdness that surrounds the legend, what an extraordinary
occurrence it was!Here were some
of the best minds ever applied to horse racing, studying every aspect of
the game—working together in striking contrast to the loners of the past,
and what resulted was an explosion of ideas.
Tom
Brohamer introduced Pace to the masses in 1991 with Modern Pace Handicapping
and a new generation of handicappers of the post-Picking Winners
era, began calculating “energy distributions.”
All
of this, of course, had an earlier foundation in the work of Ray Taulbot
and Huey Mahl.Huey Mahl was a man
of few words and many great ideas and, although he wrote columns for magazines
as well, my image of him is always based on what I consider his master
work:Pace Makes The Race,
a little paperback book published by Gambler’s Book Club in 1983.
Huey
was a guy who could represent an idea in a graph or table that could put
other researchers to work for a year—and you always felt he knew what the
implications were from the start.He
was one of the godfathers of modern pace theory and the complex new betting
strategies that have developed in parallel with it.
While
previous pace works have been evolutionary, Michael Pizzolla’s Handicapping
Magic is a culmination—a fusion of pace theory and betting theory, so that
they are no longer separate—and no longer theoretical.Theory-building
is an exciting phase of any science.
I
was in on one such epoch in an unrelated science and know that the downer
comes when you get past “building” into testing.Back
in horse racing, I can’t tell you how long I fumed over the fact that 6-furlong
final times don’t fit a theoretical model that is a dead-nuts lock on every
other distance that horses run, from 220 Quarter Horse dashes to a mile-and-a-half
at Belmont.
Here’s
a little aside about the honesty of Science: in every academic science
(including some major cases in medicine), some researcher somewhere has
been known to fudge results to fit a theoretical model, in order to get
or maintain funding.Handicapping
may be the most honest science on earth because, if you fudge on yourself,
you
lose funding.So, unlike academic
sciences, there is a much greater incentive to say, “Screw the model!Go
with reality!”
There
is a mountain of reality-based knowledge in Handicapping Magic,
but one of my favorite examples is perhaps a minor one:the
de-bunking of what, on the surface, appears to be a very elegant theoretical
method of crediting horses for lengths gained under certain circumstances.Through
pure experience, Pizzolla found that this tended to over-represent horses’
abilities, so he simply canned the theory and created a simple reality-based
alternative.
I
had the privilege of seeing this book in “galleys,” with the text in one
volume and the massive examples from real races in another, so I knew it
was going to be good.Even though
I was excited about it in that form, it wasn’t until I saw the finished
book with the text and examples integrated that I knew it was everything
I expected.
One
of the great things about this book is that Michael Pizzolla is a natural-born
teacher.He has taught some of these
methods and techniques in live seminars and through that school-of-hard-knocks
has learned what works and what doesn’t work in getting messages across.He
builds new ideas and reinforces them as you read through the book and work
through the examples.
For
the past six months, I’ve been telling every one who asks the most frequent
question of figure handicapping (“How do you select a pace/speed line?”),
that the answer was coming soon in a new book.This
is it.It’s here:“Form
Cycle Windows.”If you are a figure
handicapper of any persuasion and have struggled with the selection of
a representative past performance for a horse, that concept alone is well
worth the read.If you are not a
figure handicapper, then the discussions of betting strategies—the most
overlooked topic in horseracing—will fill that bill for you.
Just so you don’t
think I’m totally biased, I’ve got to say:What
is it with these Pace Guys and their three-letter acronyms?Pace
already had ESP…EPR…FFR…TPR—and now, thanks to Pizzolla, we have:PBS,
PPF, and (taking them one better) LASST.Maybe
if you string them all together and say them fast something magical will
happen.Or, maybe you should just
read the book.
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