Mike Battaglia -- odds maker
 

now how does he come up with odds, I have always wondered...sometimes I think he is bit on the "HIGH END" making odds..

as long as he does not open his mouth ..he doing a fine job..lol

He's the best race caller in the business. I don't understand why he bothers being a linesmaker.

oh yeah he is a great racecaller ;)..................but his skills as a linemaker are "gaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing ground"

LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!:) :)

Nice guy, great family heritage.....bad racecaller, average odds maker..

I know I'm personal friends with the guy, but I'm unbiased when I say that Mike Diliberto of FG is the best morning-line maker in the game.....guy is a genius of understanding how horses will be bet...you can't even sneak him on a first time starter.....

Hell yes. The family heritage... Very important in odds making. His grandmother was a great maker of bets and odds, it was clearly passed down via the linesmaking gene. And its a recessive gene, imagine that.

Pile o crap Cunningham. Name dropping silliness is also passed on by people who lose their family money. Good Lord.

Quick! Everyone to the bomb shelter!!!

LMAO. You crack me up sometimes....:D

Funniest line I've seen here! Made my stomach hurt from laughing!!!

There must be a few having nightmares about Giacamo right now. :D

I might be missing something, but this seemed totally uncalled for.

He said he knows the guy. Big deal. I'm interested that he thinks he's good at the morning line.

It would be interesting to compare morning line skills around the country. It's a test that could easily be done. (I'm interested, but not THAT interested, however!)

--Dunbar

With regard to morning lines, I seem to remember reading that public morning lines came into existence in the 1930's. Prior to the making of a morning lines, favorites won at about a 10-15% clip...after morning lines became published, favorites winning jumped to the now standard of 33%. Does anybody know if that is correct?

Ez

i know he was way off for the derby this year.
he seems like a nice enough guy on the nbc telecasts though.

Yes you have missed stuff. I have no problem with Mike Battaglia. Its the incessant compulsiveness about family heritage in horses and people via Cunningham.

I think making lines is very interesting. Battaglia is one of the few guys that actually attempts to make his odds lines realistic by making them add up to 1, or the whole (sometimes). You never see this sort of thing from phony lines like equibase.

They rarely ever give a horse odds of over 20-1 or odds lower than 8/5 at smaller tracks, so they are basically horribly unrealistic and of no value. Just a waste of space and time.

I still think you were way off base with what you reacted to in this thread.

Yeah, it does annoy me when their odds don't add up. But a morning line shouldn't add to 1, IMO. It should attempt to reflect the betting odds, which means it should add to 119% for a 16% track take. (117.6% for a 15% track take). The lines in Equibase do exceed that, but sometimes not by that much. I just checked a few at AQ that are in the 122% range. In the past I've seen odds totals as high as 135% or worse.

--Dunbar

well oddsmaking and racecalling have been covered in this thread but i think its pretty safe to say battaglia is one of the worst handicappers. hopefully we dont have to hear him and his fellow awful buddy handicapper neumeyer this year since the coverage has switched

If anyone's curious, many morning line oddsmakers follow a formula when making their line. They take a 100% base, then add the takeout plus an additional point for each horse entered in a race. They add the additional point for each horse to allow for a margin of error.

For example I'll use New York. Say they have a field of 10. Eric Donovan (New York ml oddsmaker) would add the takeout of 15% plus 10 (1 point for each horse entered in the race) to arrive at his target number for the ml (100% + 15% takeout plus 10 to arrive at his target number of 125% for his morning line to add up to. Not saying this is what Eric Donovan does in relation to his ml, just using him and New York racing as an example.

Other morning line oddsmakers will just set the same target number all the time. Say it's either 120% or 125%. It's up to the individual to deem what they feel appropriate I imagine.

Just a little bit of useless knowledge for anyone curious as to why some lines add up to different percentages from time to time.

However, there's another important point. A morning line odds has to represent a range of values. For example, the 1-1 on Bernardini represents everything from 1-1 up to, but not including, 6-5. The 6-1 on Lava Man covers everthing up to 7-1.

If you convert the given ML numbers for the Classic to probabilities and sum them, you get a whopping 131%, which would appear to reflect a 24% track hold. But if you take the mid-points of the odd range for each horse (use 1.1 to 1 for Bernardini, 6.5-1 for Lava Man, etc), and convert those odds to probabilities, it adds to 118%, which corresponds to the correct 16% track take!

--Dunbar