Quote:
Originally Posted by Light
So the book is only 62 pages. It is copyright 1995. As I've mentioned, he uses BASIC programing. Everything is still manual input AFTER you have the program up and ready. So instead of shortening your handicapping time it prolongs it.
He designs the program with factors he considers important such as "Last speed Rating". You reference the written program and see how he writes it in BASIC. In this case it is 100 Print "Enter Last Speed Rating" 105 Input S. Then he gives weight for each factor accumulating a max score of 100. He gives 10 points for the speed rating. So if the SR for a horse is 75 then that horse receives 75/10=7.5.
The finished program asks the number of horses in the race so it can then loop the same questions over for all horses in a race which you manually input.
In the grand finale he "tests" his system from ONE DAY at Aqu on DEC 15 1990. He passes over maiden races because of lack of data. His betting strategy is to bet the top two highest rated horses of the program.
His results were 4 winners from 6 races. A $27.40 horse. $4.60 Horse. $4.80. And $5.20 Horse. Comes to 90% ROI.
That test is as ridiculous as the book. Apparently between 1990 and the copyright of 1995, he did not publish anymore tests of it because the results were probably very depressing. And he even says he did not bet the six races he did publish. They are hypothetical bets.
But if his aim was just to teach you how to code, he doesn't succeed either because the book spoon feeds you the code. It does NOT teach you how to code with BASIC beyond his tiny program that fits on less than one page.
The Naivete of the author in programming and handicapping is staggering.
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It would have been interesting to read the book but not at the prices that have mentioned.
To me BASIC does not seem to be a very good language for handicapping programs. I'm not certain how you would read a comma delimited file in BASIC.
It seems to me that there would be a market for a book on how to write handicapping programs. I'm probably not the one to write it.