Homage to the Losing Punter.

A response to the HK Speed King's "Why Hong Kong Betting Syndicates Win" — and a defence of those of us who play for something else.

I read the HK Speed King's piece on the Hong Kong syndicates with interest over the weekend, and I want to begin by saying he is right. On every count.

He is right that racehorse ability in Hong Kong is, in large part, already a known quantity, and that another rating, however clever, mostly redistributes existing information. Right that syndicates win because they understand markets, not because they out-handicap the handicapper. Right that the syndicate question is not who should I back but which bets must be rejected. Right that without a sense of value, betting is a hobby. Right, too, that timing beats prediction every day of the week.

He is right, also, that the machines are better than us at this. Not because they are smarter, but because they are consistent. A computer is not affected by mood, or by the time of day, or by yesterday's losing run. It is not anchored, not primed, not made overconfident by a winner or doubtful by a loser. It does not get tired, or bored, or scared. It is not unbalanced by the half-bottle of red that seemed like a good idea, nor by the email from the accountant. It reads the form the same way at eight on a Wednesday as it does at eleven on a Saturday, and it reads the ten-thousandth race no differently from the tenth. This is not a small advantage. It is, in many cases, the advantage entire.

Most of us cannot beat the syndicates on their own terms, and we cannot beat the machines on theirs. Not by trying to do what they do, only worse.

And yet I want to push back. Not on the analysis. On what the analysis implies about why we are here at all.

The honest question

If money is the reason you bet on horses, you should stop reading right now and do something else. Anything else.

Trade equities. Drive Uber. Pick up extra shifts at the petrol station. Open an index fund. The takeout in horse racing is somewhere around twenty percent. The competition in Hong Kong is the toughest in any betting market on Earth, and the pools have been swept clean, year upon year, by professionals whose entire working lives are devoted to the small fragile uncomfortable edges they extract — supplemented, often, by rebates and inside information and other quiet advantages most of us will never see, let alone share in.

Even roulette in Las Vegas is, by the simple arithmetic of takeout, a better proposition than horse racing for anyone not exceptionally good at the latter. The house edge is lower. The variance is bounded. There is no skill required and none rewarded. If your aim is purely the optimisation of expected value, the most rational thing to do — by some distance — is to stay away from horse racing altogether.

Mr. World Pool — and, I would venture, horse racing itself — was never made for the gambler. Nor for the punter who is indifferent to an edge, and content to follow whichever loud tipster on Twitter shouts the most confidently this week. It was made, rather, for those drawn to the theoretical possibility of an edge — slender perhaps, and held only at the margins, but real enough to permit the occasional contest with the truly serious operators. For those who require, after the day's labours and the small attritions of domestic life, somewhere quieter to take the mind. The machines, naturally, are spared all of this, and require no such refuge. The rest of us, from time to time, do; and find it here, in the form book, in the slow assembly of an opinion, in the prospect of yet another small private summit on a Saturday afternoon.

It must surely be all right, in the end, to take horse racing as a hobby. Not every golfer aspires to the Masters. Most are content with a Saturday morning that earns its keep, a handicap that yields a stroke or two over the season, and the company of friends who grasp why a particular putt mattered. The rest of us, in our own way, want nothing more.

The other price

There is a cost to the alternative path that the syndicate writers tend not to mention.

If one chooses to play this game purely for money — with models and computers and automation and whatever else the machines bring to bear — one pays for that focus with something else. One pays for it with the love of racing. With a lifelong passion. With the most absorbing pastime the world has on offer. To win the Bill Benter way, you have to be willing to not care.

I have read, perhaps apocryphally, that Benter could only name two horses. Both, the story goes, because he had spent so much time scratching his head over how strangely they behaved in his database. The story stuck with me because it captures the trade exactly. The horses, in his world, were not animals to be loved. They were anomalies in a spreadsheet. He won — magnificently, by every objective measure — but he won at the cost of the thing the rest of us are doing here in the first place.

That is not a criticism of him. It is a profession, and an admirable one. I intend, in my own quiet way, to attempt both paths myself. The last year I have spent building precisely the kind of system the HK Speed King describes: an odds model that takes the market as its starting point, identifies the overlays, sizes the stake by the Kelly criterion, and is content to read its way through more racecards in a quiet afternoon than I could manage in a fortnight. It can be trained, backtested, iterated, and — if I cared to — set running in the background while I sleep. Still in testing, but it is looking promising. Whether it will make me rich, time will tell. Probably it will not — and if it did, I am quietly afraid of what it might take from me.

There is an intellectual pleasure in building it, of course. But it is not the pleasure of horse racing. I would still rather read one race to perfection, and win half a month's wages on it, than win two years' salary by a bot trawling pools in my absence. The money is fine. But it is not the same thing.

Whatever happens with the odds model, I shall go on doing what I have always done: handicapping races as a small but sharp fish among much larger ones, content to go to war with what I have, and carrying the occasional idea those larger fish could only have dreamt of for themselves. And perhaps one does not come out a loser, even at that. The whole register of feeling that a passion for racing draws out of a man — joy, sorrow, optimism, pessimism, the lot — has its own worth, and asks no further justification.

In closing

Oscar Wilde once defined a cynic as a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. The syndicate path, taken all the way, is something close to that — a discipline that has trained itself out of caring about anything that cannot be priced. An admirable discipline, in its own right. But not the only way to take this game seriously.

I did not build Mr. World Pool for the cynics. Nor for the pure gamblers of chance. I built it for the original horse punters — those who would rather be right than lucky, who do not know a better way to spend a Saturday than loaded with opinions on quality racing, who keep coming back to the form book through the bad weeks as well as the good — finding, like Camus's Sisyphus, that the consciousness of the task, embraced fully, is itself a kind of meaning.

Like Sisyphus with his boulder — pushing it up the hill on Friday night, watching it roll back down most Sunday afternoons, beginning again on Monday.

One must imagine horseplayers happy.

Aksel Edvardsen is the founder of Mr. World Pool, a premium racing analytics platform for serious form students.