It’s true. Everybody has a system. This is being written the next day because I was up all evening (actually late into this morning) designing a spreadsheet to crack the odds on a horse racing track. Far be it from me to gamble and I admit I know nothing about horse racing. Then again, I know a pattern when I see one. That, Sunshine, is what we talk about today.
Mostly, I mean. Other things did happen. For instance, Juan-Carlos was in today and was visibly impressed by the progress of his son. The kid is definitely too restless to keep occupied for so many hours a day. I speak from a life-long experience of being a kid. We composed photographs. Most parents are on the to trick of kids doing fancy things, but Juan-Carlos was not ready for Daniel to be able to explain in great detail the things that cause a good photo. Like the rule of thirds, props, posing and leading space. When the kid can tell the parents detailed accounts of things they don’t know themselves, then we have progress.
Remember Roy, the writer who lent me the publishing booklets. To return them we met at Dunkin Donuts for coffee after work. He ordered some kind of “funny coffee”, which set him back $3.30. He is kind of a neat dude and likes the same kind of women as I do, but I don’t know if we could be buddies because he has one terribly annoying quirk. He has perfected that tactic of suggesting things that are difficult or expensive to prove him wrong.
Did you try this? Well, it might work, you know. Try it and see. We had been talking about my car battery. He says pull the fuses one at a time which would take ten days, while I am not yet even suspicious that it is the battery. I wonder how he would tackle my camera driver. When I installed the new Brother printer, my digital camera quit working and cannot be made to work.
Anyway, I know you want the good on the gambling. Okay. It is based on statistics only. There is an on-line race track with nine horses and thirteen races per day. What my informant has noticed is that there has never been a day when the horse in starting position number four has not won at least one race. The track owners publish the odds of each horse winning; how they do this I have no idea. With me so far?
This was more complicated than need be since I rarely and this case never do these kinds of calculations. Most of the last five hours was creating the spreadsheet. One mistake and you lose everything. Here is how it works. First, you get the racing form and enter the set of all thirteen odds on horse number four. You have bet nothing yet, this is a pure calculation. The presumption is that that the horse in that position is going to win one race each day. This is the real risk, all the rest is arithmetic. Except you don’t know that when you start.
Okay, the next step is based on the “system”. You arrive ready to bet on all thirteen races if necessary, but to quit betting when horse four wins. My spreadsheet calculates in advance the total amount of money (your float) needed in case you wind up betting on all thirteen races, losing the first twelve. On average, you should have a win by the sixth race, but you must have enough money to cover all thirteen.
The idea is to bet enough to win a desired amount, say $200, each day, net of your betting money. Thus, if you bet $40 to win $200 at certain odds, you must win $240 to net your goal. Right? $240 - $40 = $200. The amount you bet varies with the odds on each race. Here is where it gets complicated. If you loose, you must bet enough on each subsequent race to cover the current bet plus all the accumulated losses from earlier losing bets that day. This was a charm of an algorithm, because it requires recursive calculation which I have never been good at.
Try it. Not easy. Spreadsheets can’t recurse unless all of the cells involved except the variable are a formula. What varies is the amount you bet but that depends on how much you win. How can you calculate one without the other? Recursion. Ask the computer to keep trying estimated values until the result you seek appears.
Don’t squint at the spreadsheet too hard because it contains sample information. I have no idea if the odds tested are anything like the real odds of a true horserace. However, I already know that the worse the odds on a given set (one day of thirteen races), the less of a float you need. You are really betting on how soon horse four wins, not whether or not he wins. To date, he has always won.
Other considerations? Many. There are other horses that always win, such as horse number one. However, the odds are far lower and this requires a huge float into the hundreds of thousands and also far larger individual bets. Too conspicuous anyway. The horses in positions 5 to 9 don’t win consistently. Today I am going into the shop to enter the results for the past month, July 2006. Would this be called running the numbers? Sorry.
My spreadsheet reduces the tedium of the calculation. You enter just the odds and the amount needed to win. If a day arrives when the float required to win, say $100, is less than $300, I may give it a try. I will have to get back to you because I do not know if that is realistic. You may notice a bunch of safety features in the example. There are more unseen, all designed to prevent the wrong set of odds from being used. For example, if you enter new odds without recalculating, the entire betting area turns black and you cannot even see the results.
If you are nice, I will report back on what happens next. Meanwhile, sit back and enjoy this photo of real African art, direct from the apartment of Andrea, with the tattoo across her ah, lower back.
