I grew up between Belmont Park and Aqueduct.
Long before I could legally enter the racetracks I was in attendance on a regular basis, even if I had to "hop the fence."
My companion in the 60's was a fellow (we called "Jazzbo"), an exercise ready for Calumet Farm, who grew too heavy to be a jockey.
I learned an important lesson back in the Mid 1960's when he and I took a $29 discount flights from NYC to Miami.
We were at Hialeah when I bet $500 on Dr. Fager and Jazzbo bet $50 on Biller. I accepted 4-5 while Jazzbo's steed, Biller held steady at 10-1.
Dr. Fager was 1968 horse of the year. He had set the world record at 1 mile on any surface: 1:32 1/5, (August 24, 1968) under 134 pounds.
The record still stands for dirt surface racing, 44 years later.
Biller won by a NOSE, paying precisely $22.00 for $2 An important $500 lesson. Jazzbo won precisely what I had lost lost while risking 1/10 as much.
My second "rude awakening" to "Risk of Ruin." The first was when I bet on Bret Hanover to win at Roosevelt Raceway on Long Island.
This champion trotter had won ALL 22 of his races until then. I accepted "prohibitive odds" of 1 to 5. He lost and I was busted !
In those days we had great handicap horses who carried VERY high weights over classic distances. Think 145 lbs. vs. (as low as) 109.
Horse Racing was actually exciting. By the way, Kelso, my all-time favorite!
Incidentally, for those who think otherwise, horse races are occasionally "fixed",
with cheating at Harness Racing absurdly dishonest.
The greater the purse money, the less cheating takes place. Logical enough.
Talking about "fixed" races . . . at the Finger Lakes Race Track in Western New York, I spoke with a jockey who
told me that he had been "pulling" a horse - restraining him from winning or coming close - for months,
but would easily win that day - without a class drop, equipment change, etc.
My Morning Telegraph (precursor to the Daily Racing Form) showed that in ALL of the plug's races that year
he had finished "dead last" and was never in the running. His post time odds fluctuated between 66 and 120 to one.
I spent some time in the state of Main where the horses were regularly given heroin at the Bangor Harness Track.
The purses on the cheapest races were between $100 and $200 !
The betting pools were so small that bet of more than $20 was significant, as it would drop the odds on a longshot.
All of above is from "First Hand knowledge", not rumor or innuendo.
In the late 1970's I made roughly 45K per year (tax free) while earning a similar salary as a civilian.
Nearly all of my "action" took place at the freshly opened Meadowlands racetrack in New Jersey.
My Master's Thesis Committee was chaired by a Ph.D. Statistician who liked to play the ponies.
He performed regression analyses on my weighty data base of 3 years of harness racing results.
Over 3 years - My system hit winners at over 20% of bets with mean payoff odds of approx. 9 to 2.
Do the match. One of the keys to my system was creating a matrix of acceptable odds completely
dependent upon the number of betting interests in the race at hand, e.g. in a 10 horse field my bet
would be made on a contender whose post time odds were between 7:2 and 6:1, as long as I had
rated the horse as a true contender, based on numerous weighted factors of speed, post position, etc.
It was in pre-personal computer days and the data collection and computations took me so much
time and effort that by 1979 I had retired from horse racing as I was truly becoming "Burned Out."
