Not to obscure your original point, but Taleb talks a lot about casino games such as roulette, and he says they are not the slightest bit random. The math is very well known to the casinos. The more spins, the more the players lose -- one big score would be negated over time as the player keeps playing over hours, days, months, years, and the casino is very clear on the profits in such games -- does not fit his definition of randomness in any way.
Jerry, you also seem to be agreeing with a point I made a long time ago (and you disagreed with me very strongly then), that synthetic tracks lead to imprecise numbers for a variety of reasons, not the least of which being that if horses dislike the surface and do not feel safe, they\'re often holding back, so how can you accurately give such a horse a number, and when such a horse gets on dirt and feels more confident and is able to fully extend himself, the number is obviously going to be much faster. We\'ve seen these so many times, but it never seems to sink into any sheet aficionados\' brains -- they see only the number on the page.
There are about a hundred other reasons why synthetic tracks lead to messed up numbers -- they change dramatically with the weather, much more so than dirt tracks, there simply haven\'t been synthetic tracks as long as dirt tracks, you\'re talking about a few years of data versus decades on a dirt track, and, again, most horses hate synthetic tracks and will not give a top effort over such surfaces, the pace is much slower, and on and on.
The problems with handicapping synthetic tracks are myriad. If one knows a lot about horses and what their movement and body language say, that helps some, but if you\'re using just sheet numbers, you\'ve got some major problems. It seemed not okay for you to admit that, and I don\'t know why. It\'s no knock on your data in any way.
There were some things about Animal Kingdom that stood out when compared with the other horses, most notably he is supremely well-bred on the dam side for distance, and we have a bunch of 3 years-olds this year, even more than in other years, who hinted strongly they were not going to be effective at distances longer than a mile & an 1/8. So he had an edge right away that was certainly worth taking a chance at 20-1 or so. I think his biggest problem is just the short rest going into the Preakness, there is no way to say how much the effort in the Derby took out of him, though he seems to be doing very well on the farm, you never really know, but in my mind he has an excellent chance to win the triple crown if he could walk out of Baltimore with a win, the Belmont distance will play into his hands -- I think you are down-grading him in the NY post article very severely, though again I understand you are advising gamblers on how to bet the Preakness, and I do understand why he\'s not a value play in that race. I do think he is a much better horse than you are giving him credit for though.
