Dick Mitchell was quite a guy. Lots of math skills, though he was no Dr. William Quirin. Lots of pace handicapping knowledge, yet no Doc Sartin. Lots of handicapping ability but never had the success of Dick Schmidt or Tom Brohamer.
What he did best was bring all of those handicapping concepts together very well.
Although his software was from the DOS era (i.e. pre-Windows), it was very well-designed for the age. He was the first one to capture a player’s bets and make an attempt to understand where their strengths and weaknesses were.
I think this is the most important thing what I learned from Dick Mitchell: Study the races you bet.
In his book, Commonsense Betting, which is my favorite Mitchell book, he said something to the effect that to play at a professional level, one had to know the difference between a horse that deserved to be 3/1 and one that should be 7/2. Because there are not four people on our entire planet that can do that, it made me realize that we had to find a better way to measure value than odds lines such as those. It just isn’t practical.
Thank you, Dick Mitchell.
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