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