Welcome to Pat C, Max, BillN, Patrick, Zaf, well shoot - welcome to everyone!
There seems to be a bit of new interest in Doc's work, and I wish everyone trying to get up to speed the very best, but also encouragement for persistence and patience.
There's no substitute for doing your own work and answering your own questions - even if someone else has answered a similar question for themselves: it just doesn't feel the same if someone else says, for example, 'best of the last 3 comparable pacelines, use the best Perceptor or Total Energy' versus, say, 'use best Perceptor from entire PPs if horse is in form today'. Although there will be a lot of overlap between these two example approaches to paceline selection, if you take a random 100 races (and depending on wager selection or race passing strategy), you may find that one method hits rather more or less than the other, and at different average mutuels, giving different resulting ROI, hitting and missing different longshots, etc, etc.
If you choose one consistent approach and it produces a profit over time because you studied the nuances of your method, took the lumps, etc - but most importantly, you came to own that approach, not just accept what someone else worked to own for themselves, then your confidence will be higher, and you will feel like gradually betting more. It is grunt work, but if you did actually take 100 races and work them out each way (using the above 2 example alternatives), then you will know which way works best for you.
Of course, I think it's true that the bottom line ROI is much more affected by which wagers to make from
any consistent paceline selection. So after getting comfortable with line selection, next focus on wagering mechanics like minimum acceptable odds for each of your top (say) 3 contenders (either minimums for 1 horse win bets, or net minimums for multi-horse win bets); identifying the likely 'counter-energy' horse for Place or Exacta wagers; developing a rigourous PASSing strategy (or exacta-as-win bet strategy). All the foregoing and many more wagering-related mechanics will probably have a far greater impact on profits than the nuances of paceline selection, though of course
all of it is what we need to master.
Someone wrote to me (about the Methodology in general, but it applies to Validator, Speculator and RDSS, and surely older tools) that the programs were "
designed by geniuses to be used by idiots". I like to think of myself somewhere around the middle/latter range of that spectrum - but really, the tools make life simple. The adjustments are powerful, the aggregate readouts are powerful: Total Energy, Bottom Line, Early/Late difference, VDC are powerful ideas and are the simplified fruits of a 25+ year research by Doc and crew. Record how the winner looked in the readouts, and the Place horse from a consistent line selection strategy. Then use those records to give you confidence to bet on horses who may look non-obvious or who by 'traditional' analysis look dubious.
Just for the record (and in case anyone is wondering), I am dying for (and working on
) tools to help me with all this bloody record keeping and feedback-loop. Of course there are spreadsheets (electronic or paper) to record it all and (laboriously) copy it down from various sources, and we do what we have to (or don't) , but RDSS will be close to Version 1.0 when my wager selections, my results, my models, my profit & loss show up in about 2 or 3 mouse clicks. After that, I'll take a few weeks off.
Anyway, again, welcome to everyone. A reminder and invitation: you are all most welcomed to post up a race and ask for suggestions how it might best be analysed or wagered. This will help us all learn!
Ted