Yes, I have been away for quite some time now. I have been saying that I had something worthwhile up my sleeve, but it has not been ready to put into words.....until now.

For months I have been researching horse racing. It has not been research to find great horses, jockeys and trainers, although that was an inevitable side effect along the way, or to find a better feel and respect for the tradition, another glorious side effect, but to predict horse races more accurately than the morning line odds, and find the probabilities of each horse coming in first. In other words, I approached horse racing with a gambler's eye, a microscope, a Daily Racing Form, and a calculator, to see just how close I could come to predicting the outcome of a horse race on a regular basis.

I completely understand that succeeding in this endeavor could ruin horse racing as it exists. If the tracks cannot make money, then they will no longer hold races. The sport could collapse. Really though, it doesn't have much further to fall. Name the jockey that rode the winner of last year's Kentucky Derby. Name the Horse that won last year's Kentucky Derby. Precisely. I'm sure Street Sense doesn't care that you do not remember him, but Calvin Borel should be upset. Seriously, only the Triple Crown gets people talking, and only a terrible accident like Barbaro can get people to remember a horse anymore. On the other hand, if the betting public shows an interest in the sport......making money has a tendency to do that to people, and then the sport of horse racing will have a revival. Did the MIT blackjack team destroy cards? Absolutely not. In fact, the time following the MIT blackjack team saw resurgence in the game. Horse racing can have that resurgence too, and it won't take a Triple Crown winner to do it. People just need to think they are smarter than the game and believe they can win. The money can be made up to a degree in television ratings and advertising. If people think they have an edge over the house, they will pay very close attention. As soon as the system starts getting beaten, the people in charge of the track will change it. The house is always designed to win. Horse racing will be fine, especially after finding a new casual audience of supporters. They get their rake no matter what. All it takes is a formula that will produce winners with consistency. A formula that can pick horses better than just looking at the morning line odds would make people feel like they have a huge advantage. Now I have my task.

The base of my research was academic journals. Curiously enough, there are more than a few scholars who have been enthralled enough by the sport and the math involved to have published there own works on the subject. In “Searching for Positive Returns at the Track: A Multinominal Logit Model for Handicapping Horse Races”, by Ruth N. Bolton and Randall G. Chapman, I found the information that would carry me through this project. Bolton and Chapman set out to find which variables would be most important to consider when evaluating the horses in a race, and predicting the outcome. There research suggested that "average amount of money earned per race in the current year" and "average speed rating over the last four races" were the two most important factors. "Lifetime win percentage" was also considered a significant variable, but not so much as the first two. The shocker to me was that jockeys, post position,

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