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“Handicapping Magic”
Some Unabashedly Biased Notes On A Great New 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.
Copyright(C) 2003 Charles Carroll - DesertSea.Com
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Charles Carroll
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