HANDICAPPING FEATURE
JANUARY 12, 2011
Prime Power: A great elimination tool for your playing practice
by Art Parker
It’s a tough game we play, this thing called horse racing. It begins with
intrigue followed by curiosity. Then comes investigation followed by a few
answers. Bad tickets crash to the ground while these stages come and go. At some
point we experience enough success to make us more determined than ever to seek
even more answers. We experiment with and try various systems (anyone who says
they have never tried a system is a liar).
One day we wake up and realize that playing the horses is like practicing
medicine or practicing law. It is practice, not perfection. A physician gathers
information about a patient and does his best to make a correct diagnosis before
deciding on a remedy. That’s what we do. We look at every race the way the
physician looks at every patient. We are in hot pursuit of the correct diagnosis
of every race we exam because a correct remedy results in an instant reward.
Some of us do what doctors and lawyers do and become specialists. We begin to
ignore certain types of races and limit our play to those types that make it
easier to “perfect our practice.” Years ago I determined that my best results
playing the horses came by playing sprints. My definition of a sprint is a race
around one turn of at least 5 1/2 furlongs but not more than seven furlongs. I
decided that my sprint play should be limited to dirt (main track) races only,
which is not difficult since we have few sprints on the turf in this country.
After a while I narrowed my practice down to claiming and allowance races
only. No maidens, no stakes and no babies. My serious horse play would be
sprints on dirt, claiming or allowance only (including starter races).
Naturally, I play the Kentucky Derby (G1) and Breeders’ Cup every year, and some
tournaments on occasion, but my daily practice is limited to a well-defined
group of races.
Specialists or not, all of us with many years at this game continue to digest
enormous amounts of information about horse racing. We read tons of material
every year, most of which is discarded because experienced players have pretty
much seen it all, or we think we have seen it all. We learn what information to
trust, and we keep at our fingertips the information we believe is necessary to
be successful.
While novices are looking for the system to “pick winners,” we simply look
for an angle or tidbits of information that may help us identify and discard
pretenders. We know that brain power is the ultimate, final authority in our
practice and that is why we make our final selections instead of relying upon
someone else to make them for us.
I tossed the Daily Racing Form a few years ago and replaced it with
Brisnet because of the healthy supply of information in Brisnet past
performances. Brisnet gave me extra elimination tools and most of all, the
trainer information made a great compliment for my own trainer files.
At first, I was reluctant to use Brisnet’s “Prime Power,” mainly because I
thought it was placed in the past performances as a “system” to help the novice
player. As my Dad use to tell me, that’s what you get for thinking when you’re
not used to it!
I decided to use Prime Power after a trip to Keeneland. A friend in my
hometown (Millbrook, Alabama) had never seen a horse race and asked me to take
him on a trip to Kentucky, “Whenever you can tear yourself away from that
computer racing,” he said. I promised him a couple of days at a special place
called Keeneland when October rolled around.
Sitting on an outside bench on a beautiful October day at Keeneland will make
you forget about all of the problems that plague the world. My friend was happy
with a cold beer and his first-ever helping of Burgoo as I was absorbing my
Brisnet information. About 10 minutes before post time of the first race, a
fellow sat down on the bench and I quickly sensed he was trying to read my
stuff. I looked at him and growled, “What the hell do you want?” He was quick to
beg forgiveness and said, “I forgot to run my Brisnet sheets and I just want you
to tell me who the big number is in this race?”
At that time I did not know what he was talking about. I responded with, “The
biggest speed figure?” He said he wanted the top Prime Power number. I told him
who it was and he said nothing else. As he was examining the Daily Racing
Form I heard him talking to himself and saying; “Now it makes sense. That’s
why he is the big number.”
As it turned out, the top Prime Power horse won the race. I looked at the guy
and asked him if that’s the way he always plays. He said he always started with
Brisnet’s top Prime Power and then tried to validate that horse as the best by
looking at the past performances. “If I’m not comfortable with their top two to
three selections I just pass the race,” he explained.
After that trip to Keeneland I began to tinker with Prime Power and causally
tested it to confirm Brisnet’s performance claims. After a while I realized that
I made a mistake with my initial assessment and I began to pay closer attention
to Prime Power using it as another tool for elimination of pretenders in a race.
What I like best about Prime Power is that one can look near the bottom of a
long list of entrants and see the point disparities. It is a quick way to grasp
the idea that a horse, or several horses, have a lot going against them, or they
have just too much to overcome. Brisnet’s Prime Power is such a good tool one
can save tremendous time, not trying to select winners with it, but eliminating
horses from consideration without seeking validation of insufficiencies.
Oh, it’s true; every now and then you are bitten by one of those low rated
horses eliminated from consideration when it crosses the line first. But just
remember, its practice, not perfection.
I’m still trying to complete several Prime Power studies from this past year
of racing, and hope to share those soon. In the meantime I encourage you to look
at Prime Power if you haven’t already and do some test work on your own. You
never know, you may turn “practice into perfection.”
-Art Parker is the editor and general manager of The Millbrook Independent
newspaper in Millbrook, Alabama, and has been an avid horse player for 25 years