What the Whales don't do · Pace Makes The Race.com

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Original Poster: Elliot Sidewater
What the whales don’t do, apparently

… Is to watch how a racing card is playing out. It has already been mentioned in another post that the rail/rail speed was golden at Parx today. I just finished watching the replays and confirmed it for myself. The odds never caught up with the reality of what was happening on the racetrack, and given that about 97% of the handle at parx is bet off track, I have no choice but to conclude that once the whales set their probabilities, they set them in concrete; they don’t change them to account for special situations like this one. Perhaps they reduce their exposure in the later races on days when they’re getting killed, but if you know what you’re looking at, days like today could be a goldmine. I was working today and didn’t have an opportunity to play, but I was amazed that the odds continued to be out of sync with reality through the entire card. This is pure speculation, but it is possible that the syndicates are in the “no such thing as a bias” camp. I’d like to hear what others think.

Reply From: Dave Schwartz
Elliot,

This is a really good point that you have made.

When one addresses the question, “How do I compete with the whales?” the logical point is to do what they do not do well. Or, in the words of Wee Willie Keeler, “Hit it where they ain’t.”

Short term track biases are one area where I would doubt the whales have any interest. The same is probably true for any other high-level math-type, because the sample is just too small to build any correlation co-efficients.

Whether you believe in very short-term track bias shifts or not, logically, this leads us to a question that could improve one’s bottom line:

“What factors are typically ignored by the largest and most successful players?”

And a continuation to that question:

“… that is reasonably easy for us to maintain and apply?”

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