Engineer's internet gaming fight

but to say it falls into the legal definition while poker doesn't seems ambiguous. How is paramutual wagering seen as more skillful than poker or blackjack? Especially for the general public.

I'd like to read your book. It'd be nice to know better when to place which type of wager at the dog/horse track. And how much makes sense to bet relative to the potential return. Also, I hate reading a horse form. At least the dogs have only 8 entries at most. Much easier to narrow down, although still hard to pick em just right. Please, how do you read those things!?

Good luck. Maybe Stanford will tell you how much he made on his book about betting horses.

Things have changed somewhat since then, with the advent of simulcasting and the proliferation of optional claiming races and the constant upgrades of DRF data, so it would take, I estimate, a couple of thousand hours of work over a couple of years....Would this be worth it? I mean, worth it for me, remuneratively.

AP books, with the exception of poker, just don't target a big enough audience to make serious money. It is really a labour of love to be done for its own sake. You *MIGHT* get lucky and capture the public imagination and make 20K a year or so, as the top-selling AP texts do. But that is like saying I might write the next best-selling fantasy book to Harry Potter.
Even then, good luck getting a publisher to put your book out in any reasonable time frame, and getting them to actually pay you. I actually had to threaten mine with debt collectors to get them to pay up. Even after that, I haven't seen a cheque or a royalty statement for four years. On every level this is just very unsatisfying.
Several members of my family have all attempted to have books published and been promised deals which never materialized - publishing is just in a really bad way right now. You'll also notice several Green Chippers have reported impending books, reports which proved optimistic.

We have some books on horses over here in the UK, which I think culturally has a much greater interest in the sport relative to the US, even when you factor in the different population size. Those books don't sell fantastically here, so I doubt it would do that well commercially over there.

It is a great pity as I would love to read the book you would write, but can't pretend in all good conscience you would find it worthwhile on a financial level.
If you want to pursue this, I'd suggest you get the advice of specialist AP publishers who can tell you honestly whether there is a market for what to write, and will distribute it, without bullshitting you or ripping you off, if they like it enough. In my experience, AP publishers have much more integrity than publishers in general.

On a personal note, I remember your "botched surgery" story when you posted it before, and I must say it touched me. You must have great strength of character to cope with something like that, it would break a lesser man. Sadly, I fear you are far from alone in having such an experience.

A few years back, a shyster wrote a booklet/pamphlet with a GREAT title: "How to Rob Racetracks Legally," and marketed it with big ads in prestigious publications like the National Enquirer and Star.

He made a killing both at the front end, and at the back end; for his real business was touting. I'm not positive, but I think this was the same guy who published the "Baltimore Bulletin."

Enough time has passed since then; so the market is probably ripe for a new hit. Just think up a REALLY great title and market it to the great unwashed.

Something more like the work of Steve Davidowitz.

There are aspects of analysis to parimutuel selection that can lead to a "p", the propensity to win, better than .5. Davidowitz, in the second edition of his principle hardcover, makes only the slightest, one sentence, passing allusion to an area almost untouched in racing literature. [Davidowitz, BTW, is indispensible reading for anyone considering wagering upon a thoroughbred.]

How important is p, the propensity to win? Let's look at an example. If one is winning (and we are talking about wagers in the win pool here) one third of one's wages, and is able to restrict these wagers to those which will pay at a mutuel price of 5:2, meaning a $7 payoff on a $2 wager, the expectation of this collection of wagers is about 17%.

Let's now assume that, through some means, p can be increased to .55, slightly better than half winners. An aggregate price of 8:5 now returns an expectation of 43%. A higher win rate reduces the need to dismiss shorter priced horses. And if you are unaware of it, most races are indeed won by shorter priced horses.

As significant as this appears, its significance is much more profound than this. The reason is that the risk involved in this sort of endeavor determines the proportion of bettable bankroll that can be devoted to a single wager. By the algorithm propounded by the late Huey Maul, the largest wager that does not endanger the bankroll at a p of .33 and an odds payoff of 5:2 is about 7%, or 1/15th. For a p of .55 and odds of 8:5 this safe proportion is 27%.(!)

This arithmetic of betting, how to achieve the high win percentages, how to structure trifecta wagers so appealing that the IRS would be holding a lot of your wealth, how to evaluate the prospects of a race horse by visual examination (barely usable in simulcast wagering, unfortunately) and more, the fruits of literally a quarter century of my middle adulthood spent in Florida racing, would be the content of this tome. Considering this, while the effort is hardly on the same scale as Gibson's history of the Roman Empire, this project would consume me, because of my anal, painstaking bent, for literally years. And with no prospect of a grand author's royalty, why bother.

A cheap hustle? A shoehorn for a touting service? No. Not hardly.