Among Ourselves – Title goes hereDel Mar: luck with silver linings and caballos de carreras in the afternoon, Part 1Among Ourselves – Title goes here

by Frank Cotolo

I was told this by a wise veteran professional horse racing gambling person: “There is no such thing as good or bad luck. There is only luck and the lack of it.”

The 1988 Del Mar thoroughbred meet succeeded at every level one can reach playing pari-mutuel horse racing. It was an immeasurable mixture of happenstance and contradiction blended with experience and knowledge and luck and more luck and more luck.

I was armed and dangerous with a healthy bankroll and a proven money-management betting scale and now and then with Natasha by my side. The first Sunday of the meet we brought along two lawn chairs and some choice Italian pastry from an authentic bakery and parked our keisters on the chairs on the upper apron in front of the finish line. Natasha held my spot if I found an overlay from my personal odds line (POL) and rushed to the windows in the final moments of wagering.

Weekdays Natasha worked and I wandered the grounds of the complex watching the tote board from any of the countless TV monitors with my coffee and pari-mutuel wagering paraphernalia. I was breaking even in the early going but not from much playing. My POL needed attention as I became acquainted with the rhythms of the racetrack.

One weekday I bet a horse and a young, clean-cut fellow walked up to me and said, “Heard you called a bet on the six, Wire Buzz.”

“Yes. He is the play.”

“You like him.”

“He is not my first choice; he is my bet. The only overlay.”

“To win?”

“Yeah.”

After we watched Wire Buzz run second the tall, young, clean-cut well-dressed fellow said, “I’m Rick. I’m a day-trader. A silver trader.”

So, I called him Rick Silver and we exchanged horse-racing tales and betting wins and woes and all that stuff that binds bettors and beggars. When the weekend came it was Rick and Natasha and me and it settled there until a strange envelope came to my Leucadia apartment. It did not have a return address. Inside was a chapbook I recall as Power Plays. I recall the author was Biff Warden.

It was one of the many beat-the-races systems sent to me as an American Turf Monthly journalist. These indie publications were never — never — reliable guides to success. For a lark I brought it to Rick.

“You said you kept speed figures at Hollywood Park,” he said.

“Yeah. A lot of work.”

“This guy has speed ratings. Figures using all the usual data. I tested it on some races and found a winning pattern. Granted, it is not empirical. I only have so many races to test it. But they produced a 100-per cent winners.”

Rick traded silver and was adept at understanding data and trends in financial circles. He found using Biff’s speed ratings that horses shipped to Del Mar from Agua Caliente produced superior numbers; better than any of the overnight stock.

“And most won and all hit the board,” he said. “And all winners paid double digits.”

He produced the data neatly written in a spread sheet.

Agua Caliente Racetrack was a combination horse/greyhound racetrack just across the California border in Tijuana, Mexico. It was best known in the U.S. for its major role in a movie about the ill-fated champion Phar Lap when he won the Agua Caliente Handicap. It was the first North American track to offer a Pick 6. Thoroughbreds raced on its dry and sandy surface with average six-furlong marks below 1:10. Rick’s calculations using Biff’s system paled the sprint-speed numbers of the local and shipped-in steeds at Del Mar and the California racing circuit (including the northern venues that were already considered less classy than the southern ones).

I said, “A veteran winning horseplayer once told me that most any winning system could work only for a spell before it collapsed and then it remained a mystery how it ever produced success.”

“A spell is all we need,” he said.

I shared the process with Natasha before the next weekend. She was excited. She was sharp and I knew the three of us would get along fine.

After Rick and I vetted the data he collected from the meet’s early races, we invested time to focus only on the Del Mar dirt sprints that offered entries shipping in from Agua Caliente. They were sprinkled throughout upcoming programs. We demanded odds of 5-2 up; that low at first in case the trend was already fading or gone. I made mock POLs using the Biff factor as the major percentage value attribute and though it seemed like a kooky process, we were professionals willing to gamble on being profit pioneers with no plans to share success or thank Biff in private or in public.