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Old 10-26-2018, 08:47 PM   #31
AltonKelsey
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Never heard of the book, but I'd guess that it will be totally useless to you now .


If there was anything really good in there, wouldn't we know about it by now ?
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Old 10-26-2018, 09:45 PM   #32
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On the other hand I have found several for sale at various online sites, all asking for about $100. Maybe I could buy one, read it, then resell it.
Don't buy the book. I found my old copy today. I'll tell you why it sucks tomorrow. Gotta go out with the wife right now. And when she says now, she means NOW!
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Old 10-27-2018, 03:38 PM   #33
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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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Old 10-28-2018, 02:22 PM   #34
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I'd like to point out that what the author considered to be a "handicapping program" back then is a simple macro today.
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Old 10-28-2018, 04:13 PM   #35
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Curious if the original poster is the man who recently offered me $500 for Brecher's Beat the Races with a Computer book.
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Old 10-30-2018, 09:22 AM   #36
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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.
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.
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Old 10-30-2018, 02:01 PM   #37
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It would have been interesting to read the book but not at the prices that have mentioned.
Actually it isn't interesting because he does not teach. He does not get into the structure of coding as it relates to an output.

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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.
BASIC has had many versions. I believe VISUAL BASIC can import and process a delimited file.

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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.
I don't believe that is necessary. Decide what you want to see in an output file and then build the program to do that for you.

A co horse player friend of mine made us a horse racing program using Dbase3, a computer program from the 90's he majored in. It has many files and pages of code. Comparing that to the Author of the book you reference whose code is less than 1 page and you should understand that that book is a waste of your time and money. My program imports Bris files, processes them and outputs several factors I want to see including concepts from various Authors such as Scott form factors.

I've since moved on to using Excel (2016). I write my own Macros for the outputs I want to see and use Excel as a Database for results.
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