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Handicapping Magic
Handicapping Magic presents a comprehensive approach to handicapping the thoroughbred horse race. It's not just another book by an expert showing how good he is. Instead, the techniques are explained step by step and there are dozens of real life examples. Complete instructions on calculating the Fulcrum Pace, Pace Balanced Speed Numbers, Projected Power Fractions, Form Cycle Windows, and much more are provided. The book also contains valuable advice on avoiding the Seven Illusions that can defeat the player, and how to answer the Seven Magic Questions in a Race. Most importantly, the real meaning of the overlay--a true value bet--is revealed and the book will show you how to find them and capitalize from them. The techniques revealed in this book are so simple and straightforward, so easy to use that it will truly seem like Handicapping Magic!
448 pages, Paperback
First published August 8, 2000
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January 23, 2008
Michael Pizzolla, Handicapping Magic (ITS Press, 2000)
It's impossible to write a review of a handicapping book just after reading it, really, and comment on what the mechanics of the writing are all about. I'll be back in a year or so to cogitate on all that and whether it works or not. Or you can take a look at other reviews, which look like, well, reviews of almost every other handicapping book out there. Works for some folks. Not for others. We shall see.
From the standpoint of logic, clarity, theory, and understanding, though, Handicapping Magic is simply the holy grail of handicapping books. I've probably read two hundred books on handicapping in the past ten years, ranging from the sublime (Brohamer, Quinn, etc.) to the ridiculous (any book whose handicapping method is based on "smart money", etc.), and despite having read all those and more, there were still some great unanswered questions about handicapping. I've asked them, at the risk of sounding like a rank beginner, on for a far and wide over the course of those ten years, to weekend warriors and professional handicappers alike, to those who author handicapping books and those who run handicapping websites, to the guys in thousand-dollar suits in the clubhouse and the guys in tattered shorts on the apron. Ask a hundred people you get a hundred answers, at least ninety-five of which will be "I don't know" in some dialect of horse. They're simple questions, too, or seem so. "How can you tell if a horse is in good form?" "What IS good form?" "How can you tell where a horse is in his form cycle?" "How do you tell what horse in a race is most likely to be on the lead?" "If a horse isn't on the lead, what are the chances he'll still manage to run well?" (I've gotten many, many answers to that last one, and I still wonder if some of the people who expounded on that one for ten minutes managed to cash tickets on the 2002 Blue Grass Stakes, where perennial frontrunner Millennium Wind, who'd never managed to press a pace in his life, finished second after not once getting his nose in front. I suspect I know the answer.) It is the stuff pace handicapping is made of, and no one from Lucky Jim, the other guy who chainsmokes his tickets at Thistledown, to Tom Brohamer, author of Modern Pace Handicapping, has ever managed to set me straight on any of those questions.
Along comes Michael Pizzolla. And he makes the same basic assumptions most racing writers do, I think-that if you're reading a handicapping book for the "advanced" set, you probably already know those answers. But Pizzolla doesn't make the mistake of then assuming that you can skate by those questions and their all-too-elusive answers to get to the meat of the matter; he actually gives you the answers. I'd have been a convert for life halfway through chapter two on Pizzolla's easy-to-follow description of whether a horse is in form and capable of competing in today's race alone.
Without testing the actual methods Pizzolla gives us in the book, which is of course the acid test of any handicapping manual, the test of a handicapping book for me is the same as the test for a book of poetry: did I find something in it I can steal, and is the stuff around the stealable material at least readable? In both cases Handicapping Magic gets the loudest "YES!" I've managed since Composer, Jambalaya Jazz, and Knockadoon kicked back twenty-four grand in a minor stakes race at Keeneland in April 1997 on a two-dollar ticket. (And that was the simplest system ever, which I'll give you free: they were the only three also-rans in Triple Crown races competing in the race. No-thought trifecta box. Glory be and alli-lujah.)
A number of other reviewers have called this the best book on handicapping they've read, hands down. I'm not sure I'd go that far, but it is without doubt on a par with Modern Pace Handicapping, Beyer on Speed, William Quirin's High-Tech Handicapping in the Information Age, Mark Cramer's The Odds on Your Side, Ziemba and Hausch's Inefficiencies in Racetrack Betting Markets, and other such rarefied tomes. Even if you end up not pulling a profit out of the methods listed herein, there is a great deal to be learned, and while it's probably not the best first book one could buy on handicapping, anyone who's read one of the fine primers on the sport to be found (Ainslie's books, Davidowitz' Betting Thoroughbreds, or Chuck Badone's painfully-titled but brilliant Winning Horseracing Handicapping) shouldn't be too far underwater with this. **** ½
It's impossible to write a review of a handicapping book just after reading it, really, and comment on what the mechanics of the writing are all about. I'll be back in a year or so to cogitate on all that and whether it works or not. Or you can take a look at other reviews, which look like, well, reviews of almost every other handicapping book out there. Works for some folks. Not for others. We shall see.
From the standpoint of logic, clarity, theory, and understanding, though, Handicapping Magic is simply the holy grail of handicapping books. I've probably read two hundred books on handicapping in the past ten years, ranging from the sublime (Brohamer, Quinn, etc.) to the ridiculous (any book whose handicapping method is based on "smart money", etc.), and despite having read all those and more, there were still some great unanswered questions about handicapping. I've asked them, at the risk of sounding like a rank beginner, on for a far and wide over the course of those ten years, to weekend warriors and professional handicappers alike, to those who author handicapping books and those who run handicapping websites, to the guys in thousand-dollar suits in the clubhouse and the guys in tattered shorts on the apron. Ask a hundred people you get a hundred answers, at least ninety-five of which will be "I don't know" in some dialect of horse. They're simple questions, too, or seem so. "How can you tell if a horse is in good form?" "What IS good form?" "How can you tell where a horse is in his form cycle?" "How do you tell what horse in a race is most likely to be on the lead?" "If a horse isn't on the lead, what are the chances he'll still manage to run well?" (I've gotten many, many answers to that last one, and I still wonder if some of the people who expounded on that one for ten minutes managed to cash tickets on the 2002 Blue Grass Stakes, where perennial frontrunner Millennium Wind, who'd never managed to press a pace in his life, finished second after not once getting his nose in front. I suspect I know the answer.) It is the stuff pace handicapping is made of, and no one from Lucky Jim, the other guy who chainsmokes his tickets at Thistledown, to Tom Brohamer, author of Modern Pace Handicapping, has ever managed to set me straight on any of those questions.
Along comes Michael Pizzolla. And he makes the same basic assumptions most racing writers do, I think-that if you're reading a handicapping book for the "advanced" set, you probably already know those answers. But Pizzolla doesn't make the mistake of then assuming that you can skate by those questions and their all-too-elusive answers to get to the meat of the matter; he actually gives you the answers. I'd have been a convert for life halfway through chapter two on Pizzolla's easy-to-follow description of whether a horse is in form and capable of competing in today's race alone.
Without testing the actual methods Pizzolla gives us in the book, which is of course the acid test of any handicapping manual, the test of a handicapping book for me is the same as the test for a book of poetry: did I find something in it I can steal, and is the stuff around the stealable material at least readable? In both cases Handicapping Magic gets the loudest "YES!" I've managed since Composer, Jambalaya Jazz, and Knockadoon kicked back twenty-four grand in a minor stakes race at Keeneland in April 1997 on a two-dollar ticket. (And that was the simplest system ever, which I'll give you free: they were the only three also-rans in Triple Crown races competing in the race. No-thought trifecta box. Glory be and alli-lujah.)
A number of other reviewers have called this the best book on handicapping they've read, hands down. I'm not sure I'd go that far, but it is without doubt on a par with Modern Pace Handicapping, Beyer on Speed, William Quirin's High-Tech Handicapping in the Information Age, Mark Cramer's The Odds on Your Side, Ziemba and Hausch's Inefficiencies in Racetrack Betting Markets, and other such rarefied tomes. Even if you end up not pulling a profit out of the methods listed herein, there is a great deal to be learned, and while it's probably not the best first book one could buy on handicapping, anyone who's read one of the fine primers on the sport to be found (Ainslie's books, Davidowitz' Betting Thoroughbreds, or Chuck Badone's painfully-titled but brilliant Winning Horseracing Handicapping) shouldn't be too far underwater with this. **** ½
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