that gut feeling

[ShadowRoll]

Got a theory about handicapping, not one that hasn't been proposed before, I'm sure, but was wondering what other people thought.

When I handicap, I use the standard stuff -- pace, form, trainer stats, my "horses to watch" trip notes, etc. -- and write everything down on a legal pad, listing all the plusses and minuses for each horse (and, yeah, I do feel kind of dorky walking around with a legal pad at the track, but it's handy for making exacta payout grids). I try not to make too many value judgments of one horse versus another when I'm making these notes, but when I get done, I look at the whole thing and try to get a sense of what seems most important in this particular race. Sometimes, one horse seems to stand out, even if he doesn't have the most plusses, for reasons that I might not have considered that important in a different race. In these situations, the assets of the horse don't seem proportional to the sureness of my feeling that he's gonna' win. My records appear to show that I'm right about that horse, when I get that feeling, more often than my normal ability to pick a winner, but it happens too rarely to be sure.

Here's my theory: intuition in these cases is the subconscious processing of information to achieve a right result, even when you can't express why you're so sure because there's too many factors to consciously grasp. Sort of like a black box computer that spits out the answer without you knowing the formula used to get there.

Is this wacky, just self-delusion, or do others have this experience? Seems to me that if this is a real phenomena, you should be able to somehow exercise this ability, make it happen more often. There's got to be a hard-nosed empiricist out there who can tell me I'm not nuts.

Of course, it also seems to help if I find a lucky heads-up penny on the ground on the way to the window.