Santa Anita Showvivor

[Dunbar]

Here's another idea, ranger. You and sgtennis could agree that the eventual winner gets 60% and the loser (2nd place) gets 40%. That way, if he thinks his current 1-game lead is worth something extra, it'll get rewarded at the end if he wins.

--Dunbar

[ranger5830]

I like that idea, I play a lot of poker tournaments and it is common practice that once you get to heads up, to split the money that is left but still leave something to play for to make it interesting. Perhaps $2k each and then leave $1k "on the table" so to speak. I think my lead in the place tiebreak has some value so I think that is a good split. When I wrote that post I was two wins behind but made up one over the weekend, but lost a piece of my total places lead.

When I had my first miss we had a discussion about the importance of field size, I was curious so I went through and evaluated all the odds-on horses at the current meeting so far through Sunday. (Can't say "odds-on favorites" because there was a 4-horse race that had two 9-10 shots.) Anyway, here is what I found:

field size itm% # of applicable horses

4 100 7
5 83.3 30
6 88.2 34
7 80 20
8 84 25
9 85.7 14
10 87.5 8
11 100 3
12 100 2
13 100 1

Obviously it's a very small sample size, but it seems to indicate that field size is not the most important factor, the quality of the horse relative to its competition is, other than the 4 horse fields where you need the favorite to run dead last. Plus in contests like this the horse in the short field will always get more picks. With the 12-13 fields you get very good horses that
lay over the field, for instance the three horses so far that have been odds on have been Dortmund, Gimme da Lute and Shared Belief.

[Dunbar]

That's nice work on the field size, ranger. It makes a good case for your argument.

I can't help but point out that the field sizes 4-6 do better than field sizes 7-13, though. 87.3% vs 84.9%. The only way I can defend dividing "small" and "large" that way, though, is by saying it puts about half the races in each category. (71 races had 4-6 horses, 73 races had 7-13 horses.)

At any rate, I agree with you that whether the fav towers over the other horses is probably more important than field size.

It looks to me like 88% is a reasonable upper bound on the chance of a heavy favorite actually finishing in the money. If all your picks have an 88% chance of finishing in the top 3, there's about a 1 in 240 chance of picking 43 in a row. If you can nudge your picks up to a 90% success rate, the chance of getting 43 in a row is 1 in 93.

[knickslions2]

No need to split Ranger. Just kick his ass the next few weeks. All you need now is to pick winners!!! Best of luck

[ranger5830]

So the contest goes on, and we are now down to 16 racing days left. Unfortunately I fell another win behind sgtennis and am now down by two, 46-44. Hardly insurmountable but certainly can't fall any further behind. I am very limited in what I can say due to the unique nature of playing basically against one person instead of 4500+, I'll just say that I'm trying to pick as many winners as I can.

I've decided just to play it out and not seek a split due to all the uncertainties involved, tax reasons, etc. plus while significant, the amount involved is not really life-changing. But I hope to use it to fund a trip to Saratoga for Travers week, I'm going either way but I'll have a lot more fun if I have an extra 5k to spend.

[ranger5830]

So the Showvivor contest has come to an end, and I just wanted to congratulate sgtennis for winning the longest show streak and the associated $5000 prize, as he got very hot at the end and I did not, as he won the total wins tiebreak by a final count of 53-48. It was such a different style of play at the end, especially being behind, I felt like it was as much a game of rock-paper-scissors as it was a game of trying to pick winners, as any time we picked the same horse I could not make up any ground. Anyway, I basically tried to pick the second most likely winner on any given card, and even though many of them were short priced favorites, very few won, and it seemed like almost every horse that he picked won, even if it wasn't the big favorite of the day.

There is some good news, I received an email from Santa Anita informing me that they were offering me $100 as a consolation prize. Of course it's not $5k but it is something, and I wanted to publicly thank them for that as they were not obligated to do that.

Thanks to everyone for following along, and I already can't wait for the Autumn meeting so we can give it another shot. It's about time someone from DT took down the big one in this contest.

[casp0555]

Originally Posted by ranger5830

So the Showvivor contest has come to an end, and I just wanted to congratulate sgtennis for winning the longest show streak and the associated $5000 prize, as he got very hot at the end and I did not, as he won the total wins tiebreak by a final count of 53-48. It was such a different style of play at the end, especially being behind, I felt like it was as much a game of rock-paper-scissors as it was a game of trying to pick winners, as any time we picked the same horse I could not make up any ground. Anyway, I basically tried to pick the second most likely winner on any given card, and even though many of them were short priced favorites, very few won, and it seemed like almost every horse that he picked won, even if it wasn't the big favorite of the day.

There is some good news, I received an email from Santa Anita informing me that they were offering me $100 as a consolation prize. Of course it's not $5k but it is something, and I wanted to publicly thank them for that as they were not obligated to do that.

Thanks to everyone for following along, and I already can't wait for the Autumn meeting so we can give it another shot. It's about time someone from DT took down the big one in this contest.

you gave it a hellofa shot ranger....great job

[knickslions2]

Originally Posted by ranger5830

So the Showvivor contest has come to an end, and I just wanted to congratulate sgtennis for winning the longest show streak and the associated $5000 prize, as he got very hot at the end and I did not, as he won the total wins tiebreak by a final count of 53-48. It was such a different style of play at the end, especially being behind, I felt like it was as much a game of rock-paper-scissors as it was a game of trying to pick winners, as any time we picked the same horse I could not make up any ground. Anyway, I basically tried to pick the second most likely winner on any given card, and even though many of them were short priced favorites, very few won, and it seemed like almost every horse that he picked won, even if it wasn't the big favorite of the day.

There is some good news, I received an email from Santa Anita informing me that they were offering me $100 as a consolation prize. Of course it's not $5k but it is something, and I wanted to publicly thank them for that as they were not obligated to do that.

Thanks to everyone for following along, and I already can't wait for the Autumn meeting so we can give it another shot. It's about time someone from DT took down the big one in this contest.

Well done Ranger!! Hell of an effort.

[Dunbar]

Originally Posted by casp0555

you gave it a hellofa shot ranger....great job

ditto that!

And I agree it was classy of Santa Anita to send you the $100.

[bigrun]

Great run ranger..any other time you would have been a clear winner..

sgtennis. wonder if that could be Sgt. Ennis, a military guy..