Tote-X-Ray update
 

As of 10/26 I have stats on 28 races for KEE, PHA, BEL, MNR.

There were 22 winners within the top 4 Tote X-ray horses taken at 1 MTP
or less. There were 14 exactas included in the 22 win races.

WIN % = 22/28 = 78.6 %
EXACTA % = 14/22 = 63.6%

I tried this for the first time with modest betting on MNR for 10/26.
There were 7 winners within the top 4 x-ray horses out of 8 races and
there were 6 exactas included with the 7 win races. There were actually
9 races but I passed one.

I set up 2 monitors, one monitor with video and my betting screen.
the other monitor to view the Tote-x-ray and my analysis screen behind
the x-ray screen

I first used RDSS to get my 5 top contenders. I jotted down the contenders
and pertinent data on a worksheet that I devised. Since there is only about
1 to 1.5 minutes to make a decision I didn't want to waste time toggling
between screens. At 1 MTP or sometimes 0 MTP I found there was still time
to get my bets in. I generally knew the contenders I wanted to play.
I made my final betting decisions by comparing my contenders to the top
4 X-ray horses and basically bet those horses (at acceptable odds) in
various combos of win and exactas. The majority of the horses were present
on both of my analysis screen and Tote X-ray. It took some races
to get used to this and no I did not win 7 races and 6 exactas.

I ended with 2 winners and 2 exactas for a ROI of 38%. This looks promising
but I found it to be intense and my brain was fried at the end.

So that's my story.

Ernie

Ernie,

Thanks for being a pioneer (you know, the ones with the arrows in their backs, or fried brains... :eek: )

The Tote Xray (TX) measures several relationships between the 3 WPS pools, including the Win Odds, and as you observe, it really doesn't start to become meaningful until a few minutes to post and/or until there is a certain amount of money in the pools. I fully acknowledge the truth that LOTS of money enters the pools AFTER you have to make tote-related decisions and that Win Odds can definitely change. But my proposition is (subject to much further testing) that the relationships between the pools change less with the late money than the Win Odds themselves.

Clearly the TX numbers change late, too, but this raises another interesting issue: the numbers themselves are actually percentage of best (like the style of a number of other readouts). Often you will see that the top 4 numbers are all within a few percentage points of 0.0% (best), for example 0.0, 0.5, 1.0, 1.8. In this example, it means that the 4th ranked TX is only 1.8% worse than best, which may not even be a statistically significant difference. Or, that all those 4 horses have money distributed fairly equally between the pools, i.e. the ratios of Show to Place to Win to Totals to Mean, etc, with no one horse taking a disproportionate amount of money in the Win Pool, possibly an indication by the crowd (or educated bettors, or insiders, or whales - who are part of the crowd...) that the Win Odds say it all: there's no extra information in the TX analysis.

If the TX values and ranks align pretty well with Win Odds, there's no extra info in the TX. If the TX 0.0 horse is also the betting favourite, there's no extra information, and also why the TX 0.0 is not coloured RED. Thus, in your study, I would advise you to also keep track of what the Win Odds ranks were. 22 of 28 winners may have been top 4 TX, but then again the same percentage may also have been top 4 Win Odds ranked as well (and the top 4 Win Odds do win a high percentage of all races anyway). So the interesting info might be where TX diverges from Win Odds - say, where TX #1 or #2 is the 3rd Win Odds, or outside the top 4 Win Odds, etc.

Performing this additional analysis and marrying it with actual handicapping factors (e.g. BL, VDC, CPR, TPP, Total Energy) seems like a good source of intelligence of when horses modestly regarded in BL (e.g. Tier 3 or 4) are possibly live in the opinion of the crowd, yet somewhat hidden in the Win Odds.

One of the original uses of what became TX was to dutch or hedge between the top 3 TX ranks. If Win Odds are low (e.g. < 2-1) and match the TX rank, hedge a portion of the bet so that you break even or lose only a little (like insurance) if this favourite actually wins, and dutch the rest of your Win bet unit to make about the same desired profit on the next 2 ranked TX when the favourite loses. You can certainly do this using Win Odds only, but the idea was that the TX gives some extra info -an Xray beneath simple visible-to-the-public Win Odds alone. Since there is no handicapping involved, you can do it in bulk, and on quarter horses, standard breds, Arabians, UK, Australian, Far East racing...

For the record, I don't know whether those who use TX this way make money long term. When I use TX, it is often for races with young horses or First Timers, or foreigners - i.e. where my normal analysis fails. Or, where there is lots of chaos and the favourite is perhaps 3-1 or higher. If my handicapping analysis likes a horse, and the TX likes a horse and the Win Odds are generous - time to pay attention. It's another tool to be used selectively, where it has value.

But - this whole area should be more rigourously investigated, something I'm anxious to do (among other things). In the next software release (which I've taken to referring to as RDSS 2.0) I intend to capture all this tote info to a database, tick by tick, and present it to the user to evaluate, initially likely via export to Excel or CSV file. Also, I will mix more tote info on all the handicapping screens - e.g. TX as well as Win Odds, along with Min/Max net odds for multi-horse bets and will-pays for Exacta, DD and Place pools for the combinations of your identified true Contenders. I can also split the screen a few ways width-wise, to optionally show the full (or compact version) RDSS totebrowser beside handicapping readouts.

I hope that will help your brain some, Ernie, but in the meantime I'm really looking forward to what you find.

:)

Ted

Ted,

Thank you for your elaborate response.

Included in my data is the ability to:

keep track of what the win odds ranks were but only
partially to track where the TX diverges from the win odds.

I am primarily concentrating on win / exacta data. This is time
consuming and I could always enhance my stats but for now
I prefer to keep it simple and play more rather than booking
numbers into my spreadsheet.

In my initial play at MNR I used the standard Sartin betting,
disounting the low odds favotite and betting the 2 overlays.
I also played the exacta with the low odds fav / 2 -3 overlays.
This worked out for me this time. I was arkward at the begining
and was late getting my bets and had a few coulda, woulda
scenarios.
I intend to continue with this method as long as I can kick
up my ROI. I hope to improve and learn more with time.

I am looking forward to your next release (RDSS 2.0).
Looks like there will be a lot of 'nice to have' features.
Amoung the other features, the ability to show the RDSS
Totebrowser beside the handicapping readout will be a big plus
to me.

I was also reading, with great interest, the posts about the
auto paceline process. With these forthcoming tools life is
getting better all the time.

Regards,

Ernie