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Overlay, Overlay: How to Bet Horses Like a Pro by Bill Heller (1-Apr-1990) Paperback
Heller shows a bottom line he wants you to be a better handicapper than you now are, regardless of your level of betting sophistication.
- GenresHorse Racing
Paperback
First published May 25, 1990
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December 6, 2008
Vincent Reo, Finding Hot Horses (Bonus, 1993)
Bill Heller, Overlay, Overlay: How to Bet Horse Like a Pro (Bonus, 1990)
Bob McKnight, Eliminate the Losers (Citadel, 1962)
Before the Breeders' Cup this year, I decided to forgo my usual re-read of Michael Pizzolla's Handicapping Magic (judging by how badly I did that weekend, this was a very bad idea) and went back to some handicapping books I read years ago to see if they were actually the same way I remembered them. Back when I first read these books, my memory tells me, I found Eliminate the Losers to be by far the best of the bunch, with the other two mediocre at best.
Finding Hot Horses was exactly as I remembered it; there's a bit of useful information here and there buried among stuff that most ten-year-olds could likely see through, a handful of long-disproven ideas, and writing that ain't all that hot. Overlay, Overlay, on the other hand, was somewhat better than I'd remembered it, and I earmarked a few ideas to pursue over the next year to see if they had any merit. There wasn't anything wrong with them on the surface, anyway.
The real surprise was Eliminate the Losers, which ended up being just another bad sixties handicapping tome. (My disdain for McKnight's Pick the Winners, which I read a few years after this one, probably should have clued me in.) The title is promising; after all, half the battle of handicapping a horse race, and sometimes much more than that, is figuring out which horses you can discard out of hand—but McKnight spends surprisingly little time on this concept given the book's title, instead spending more time on, yes, trying to pick the winners once you've eliminated the losers. Oh, well.
I'm going back to Pizzolla. At least I know the information in Handicapping Magic is worthwhile.
Overlay, Overlay ***
Finding Hot Horses **
Eliminate the Losers **
Bill Heller, Overlay, Overlay: How to Bet Horse Like a Pro (Bonus, 1990)
Bob McKnight, Eliminate the Losers (Citadel, 1962)
Before the Breeders' Cup this year, I decided to forgo my usual re-read of Michael Pizzolla's Handicapping Magic (judging by how badly I did that weekend, this was a very bad idea) and went back to some handicapping books I read years ago to see if they were actually the same way I remembered them. Back when I first read these books, my memory tells me, I found Eliminate the Losers to be by far the best of the bunch, with the other two mediocre at best.
Finding Hot Horses was exactly as I remembered it; there's a bit of useful information here and there buried among stuff that most ten-year-olds could likely see through, a handful of long-disproven ideas, and writing that ain't all that hot. Overlay, Overlay, on the other hand, was somewhat better than I'd remembered it, and I earmarked a few ideas to pursue over the next year to see if they had any merit. There wasn't anything wrong with them on the surface, anyway.
The real surprise was Eliminate the Losers, which ended up being just another bad sixties handicapping tome. (My disdain for McKnight's Pick the Winners, which I read a few years after this one, probably should have clued me in.) The title is promising; after all, half the battle of handicapping a horse race, and sometimes much more than that, is figuring out which horses you can discard out of hand—but McKnight spends surprisingly little time on this concept given the book's title, instead spending more time on, yes, trying to pick the winners once you've eliminated the losers. Oh, well.
I'm going back to Pizzolla. At least I know the information in Handicapping Magic is worthwhile.
Overlay, Overlay ***
Finding Hot Horses **
Eliminate the Losers **
Displaying 1 of 1 review