[King Glorious]

Originally Posted by brianwspencer

Seriously, I'm not trying to be snarky, but this is the kind of thing that makes me feel GREAT about playing the races.

The morning-line is one of the few items in the program that actually has NO effect on the horse at all. The horse will run the same whether it's 5-1 or 20-1, she doesn't know the difference. So if someone is deliberately choosing to ignore the items that ACTUALLY have to do with the horse, and are instead relying on the morning-line to do their handicapping for them, then it creates great prices for everyone doing their homework. It's not like every angle here listed by people was not right there on paper. The slow works angle has been debunked several times, the 12 post is no hindrance, and it's not like the horse was listed as trained by Jamie Sanders (and really, thought experiment, QUICK what is Ken McPeek known for? If your first answer isn't 2-year olds in the fall, it's South American imports....and then 2-year olds in the fall) and someone missed a late change announcement. Absolutely all of the relevant information needed to peg this horse a contender was listed right there in black and white, and if someone is relying on a morning-line to make their assessment and blaming that when they lose, rather than the fact that they seemingly overlooked EVERY pertinent angle on the horse’s page, it’s an awfully tough call to ask for that to pull at the heartstrings.

Seeing as the ML in no way influences the horse or her talent, it would be similar to me capping the races, seeing tons of relevant angles on a horse called GONNAWINONFRIDAY and then tossing the horse because it’s a Thursday afternoon, before crying to everyone that it was a putover because the horse was obviously not meant to run well on Thursday….because you know, it was right there in the program.

Please.

I get where you are coming from and I understand it. I just don't think that everyone is the most experienced of horseplayers and knows what angles to look for. Sure, it can be argued that if they don't know what they are doing, they shouldn't be putting their money in but if that's the case, the sport will be dead really soon because no new people will come in. You have to start somewhere. Think back to when you first started. Did you know all of the trends and angles? It didn't take me long but when I first started, I didn't know that Mayberry/Siegal (sp) were a lock in 2yo races in Southern Cal. I didn't know that Lukas horses usually needed a race before they showed anything. I didn't know that Frankel was magic with Europeans off the layoff. You learn as you go and now, you know to look for certain things. But most of us, when we are fairly new, don't know those things.

I agree with you 100% that odds don't affect a horse's talent or how he's going to run. But I think you underestimate how they affect how people wager. Say you have a race with Easy Goer, Sunday Silence, Alysheba, Cigar, Unbridled, and Tiznow. You might feel like Sunday Silence and Alysheba are the two likeliest to win the race and have about the same chance of doing so. But you see Sunday Silence at 2/5 and Alysheba at 8/1 on the m/l. Seeing the odds will surely affect the way you bet the race. Or if you see them both start off at 6/1 then as the betting progresses, you see SS start drifting down to 3/2 an Alysheba up to 12/1. You are going to wonder if somebody knows something or if there's something you missed. I think m/l odds and watching the toteboard has a much bigger impact on betting than it seems most of you do. As I said, most people on here are professionals, at least in their own minds if not for real. But you've got to think of it from the viewpoint of the novice. I think it should at least be brought into discussion as to why every single person on here seems to know that the horse should have been much lower than 12/1 and seemingly everyone at the track knew it too......well everyone but the person who's job it is to know. If setting the proper morning line would have meant the horse goes off at 3/5 instead of what she went off at, that's going to make a lot of the professionals happy that he made a mistake that they can take advantage of but leave a sour taste in the mouths of some that trying to get into the game.