Essential handicapping tools: 1) The King Size Sharpie

Here's a question about horse racing that many newcomers - and even some veterans - rarely ask themselves.

Where does the morning line come from?

In days gone by, a handicapper was employed by every racetrack in the United States to set the morning line (ML) odds for each horse in each race. Bear in mind that this person's decisions weren't meant to reflect what chance s/he thought each horse had in each race. Rather, they reflected what that person thought the betting market would look like when the horses jumped - a prediction of what price the betting public would make each horse on the pari-mutuel totalizator (tote).

You would expect this process to have been pretty well computerized by now, and apparently that's the direction harness racing is moving in with the Trackmaster program. But as far as we can tell, thoroughbred racing still hangs in there with the single employed line-setter. Even in wagering-friendly countries like the U.K. and Australia, the only market available to punters there trying to bet into American races is the American morning line.

Having the morning line set by a single individual who is not a professional bookmaker creates wagering opportunities. As David Hill points out in this excellent blog post, even though the morning line setter gets the post-time favorite right about 70% of the time, the differences between prediction and actual starting prices (SPs) at either end of the scale can vary widely. The morning line plays to human psychology in causing us to doubt our own abilities and trust more in the word of others when making decisions, Hill points out. The result is over-bet short-priced favorites and under-bet long-shots. And therein lie opportunities.

We will discuss in further blog posts how to use this knowledge to help us handicap long-shots better. But for the moment, lets take Hill's advice and get rid of the morning line. We don't need one person's opinion on a the relative merits of each horse in a race before we even get down to business. We don't even know, most of the time, who this person is what sort of record they have at getting the SPs right.

It's our handicapping job to form our own opinions, at least first. The morning line usually winds up being a major distraction because it makes us second-guess our handicapping decisions. So fire the line setter and do it yourself.

Step One is written for pen-and-paper 'cappers like myself but I'm sure the smartphone users can find an app somewhere that will help. Once you have your PPs stapled together with your heavy-duty stapler (see future posts), take a King Size Sharpie like the one at the top of this post.

Shut off your short-term memory (if you still have one) and begin the job of blacking out every morning line under every horse, and anywhere else you see the ML, like the list at the back of the Brisnet Ultimate PPs (also the subject of a future post). You'll find that the chiseled nib of the King Size Sharpie is exactly the right thickness for this task. Then you're ready to get down to the serious business of handicapping the race yourself without the morning line peeking over your shoulder.

Step Two is to formulate your own ML. We'll deal with that in an upcoming post.