Price plays

[storreyrich]

When there are two or more $$ horses in the same race, what makes one the price play?

[DanG]

When there are two or more $$ horses in the same race, what makes one the price play?
Rich; If your referring to the “Price Play” at the bottom of the ‘PGM screen etc…I can’t answer that, but I’ll guess it only picks one “$$” horse that is also the top ‘K of the price group.

Sidebar; Long-$$...general thoughts…

One thing I use to distinguish between two “$$” / Long Price plays is to cycle through the 7 different pacelines to see how many times the animals are $$ in each.

I do this with the export and have found the horses that are “$$” in all 7 pacelines are more live then the “$$” in 6 / 7…more so then 5 / 7 etc… (I actually just add up the field of “nLONG” and work backward from 14 max points down to assign a grade) I don’t store all 7 pacelines to produce hard facts (although I did early on like a real nutbar! :D), but I trust it enough to use it live.


Ken said in this newsletter; http://www.homebased2.com/km/pdf/HTRMonthlyReport-APR2005.pdf ”the more the merrier” as far as II, III paceline longshots go.

In Mel’s excellent “HTR Newsletters in a Nutshell” http://www.homebased2.com/km/pdf/Newsletters%20in%20Nutshell.pdf he touches on the sweet spot in odds for the $$ longs. They far exceed expectation under about 12-1 K-line, although the real whoppers are normally further down.


Also; If a “$$” longshot shows up in paceline 3 or especially 4 it is a great indicator of good things. (Yet another nugget from Mel’s PDF)

To me their very similar to the workout rating (that’s probably no coincidence is a major player in the “$$”) in that it’s a trigger / an alert and a catalyst for our own judgment and all the other variables we apply. Most HTR players learn early on to beware of early elimination of $$ horses.

[km]

The "Price Play" is just the highest post-pos of the shown $$.

Originally there was only one $$ per race selected by HTR2. But that is unworkable and many were scratched or went off too low odds. So i allowed unlimited $$ into the mix. But this makes it difficult to pick a "Price Play" from among multiple $$ horses.

So the code simply defaults to take the last one in one line by post-position. I had explained this to users in the past and offered to remove the "Price Play" entirely because of this quirk. But I received a loud chorus of "NO LEAVE IT ALONE, IT WORKS GREAT, DON"T TOUCH IT" etc.

So it is, what it is.

[njcurveball]

But this makes it difficult to pick a "Price Play" from among multiple $$ horses.

.


Boy are we spoiled! If we have to choose between two or three potential longshots, we want to know which one. ;-)

Problem there is that a successful spot play in the $20+ range is tremendous if you can get 12% or more winners consistently. So we are talking about roughly a 1 in 8 chance.

Now there are two (#1 and #2) and the program "correctly" makes the call on #1 being the better horse. But "better" in this case would be long term. So "Swami Ken" knows #1 will win an amazing 14% of the time at $25.

He downgrades #2 who wins a mere 10% of the time at $20.

Of course when #2 wins, Ken has 3 pillows over the phone is holding his ears. :eek::D

I really wish at that pricepoint there was a surefire way to separate the horses. I would be glad to bankroll anyone who could take my 2 longshot picks and toss one out and be right 90% of the time.

It is a game of percentages and I am not even sure if it would be better to list the longshot with the highest winning percentage first or the one with the highest ROI?