Gil Winston: Handicapping Angles Series

The Subtraction Addition

How can a seemingly insignificant harness racing program observation that a horse who loses ground in the stretch will produce more winning longshots than any other program-only angle? This simple angle is frequently the final decisionmaker before placing a wager. It has been the source of more double-digit winners and triple-digit (and beyond) gimmicks than any other rationale to make a bet.

This is not the angle where one follows up on a pressured front runner.  This is not betting on a horse that raced poorly because you expect the horse to race better minus additional input. But you are betting on a horse that lost ground in the stretch.

Let’s start at the beginning when I made this discovery as a sixteen-year-old clerk doing my job in a Wall Street bank.

Most transactions between the banking hours of nine-to-three every day were deposits. The majority of those deposits were checks accompanied by a deposit ticket. The teller pinned the deposit ticket to the check(s) and they eventually found their way to me. My job was to separate the checks from the deposit tickets. This created three piles. One pile was checks. One pile was deposit tickets. One pile was pins – long T-pins. I looked down at the T-pins and it stuck a chord.

School-aged boys of my generation wiled away the time when we should have been studying, to create unstoppable football plays with X’s and O’s. Each O represented an offensive player while each X was a defender. Then we would draw arrows to symbolize movement. I called upon this experience to replace these X’s and O’s in my mind’s eye and see these pins as horses and sulkies.

I then recreated races on my desk. I came to realize that the decisions made by the drivers on the last turn were keys to the outcome. Save ground? Risk losing ground by going wide on the turn? Wait for an opening that may or may not appear? Turns out that poor decisions and/or poor racing luck made strange things happen.

Sometimes the wrong decision led to total wipeout, but more often than not the horse would find a lane too late as the winner was long gone. But what does the racing program look like when this happens? It frequently shows the horse losing ground while passing horses in the stretch. This can be as true of horses going wide as for horses stuck behind dead horses. While going wide on the turn, the horse can be passed by horses going inside. If the wide horse comes back to beat the inside horses, that is a huge positive angle.

Here are the final dynamics of the stretch run as depicted on the program and how they should be evaluated:

• Gained ground, passed horses – All positive, but expect a short price.
• Gained ground, lost position – Very negative, probably caught from behind. Always overbet.
• Lost ground, lost position – Fuhgeddaboudit.
• Lost ground, passed horses – The Subtraction Addition. Release the hounds! Bet with both hands! Example: 6/4 becomes 4/7.

Don’t tell anyone, but this is also works with the thoroughbreds.

Power to the punter.

by Gil Winston, for Harnesslink