The Skeptical Handicapper: Using Data and Brains to Win at the Racetrack

Winning at the racetrack, however you define it, is neither easy nor a sure thing. But before you can think about winning, you need to learn which handicapping strategies are valuable, and which ones aren't. The Skeptical Handicapper: Using Data and Brains to Win at the Racetrack examines both popular and little-known angles to see what really works at the pari-mutuel windows. Author Barry Meadow, who wrote Money Secrets at the Racetrack, became an authority on the subject not simply by writing about it, but by playing the races full-time for decades as his major source of income. With the help of thoroughbred analytic researcher Ken Massa, Meadow checks out what happened in every race run in the U.S. and Canada between 2014 and 2017, more than 168,000 races in all. What if you had bet every first-time Lasix horse who was in the top three at the first call in his most recent start? Or followed each horse handled by a trainer-jockey combination with more than 20% wins if the horse showed the fastest first quarter last time out? Or played every 2-year-old first-time starter whose last workout was a 5-furlong bullet? This book answers these and many other handicapping problems. Your game is sure to improve by asking the key questions that Meadow raises and answers in this book. He shows you how to use both the data and your brain to profit in this most challenging of arenas.

Barry Meadow has been on a dual track--gambling, and writing about gambling--for more than 50 years. His first book, Success At The Harness Races, was published in 1967, when he was still too young to legally bet on the races at his favorite tracks, Yonkers and Roosevelt, although that didn't stop him. For five years in the 1980s, he gambled full-time on the harness races in California. This led to his writing Professional Harness Betting, a 300-page manual which explains how to become a full-time professional player. With far bigger pools available at the thoroughbreds, he decided to switch to the runners. And while making that transition, he wrote Money Secrets at the Racetrack, which has been lauded by virtually every expert as the definitive guide to money management at the track. He also launched Master Win Ratings, a service that rated every California horse and which he produced until his retirement in 2011. For seven years, from November 1996 through October 2003, he published Meadow's Racing Monthly, an award-winning handicapping and money-management newsletter. It featured articles on how to make the most money at the track, investigative exposes about the handicapping world, original statistical research, and systems tests from a large computer database. He also authored a number of handicapping booklets, including Secrets of the Pick 6 and Players Guide to Nevada Racebooks. He also found time to write Blackjack Autumn, the humorous and exciting story of his two-month quest to play blackjack in every casino in Nevada. More recently, he wrote a column from 2004 through 2017 for American Turf Monthly, and remains a frequent contributor to the Horseplayers Association of North America magazine. Meadow was a speaker at every Handicapping Expo since 1990 and was a member of the NTRA Players Panel. He's testified as a players' advocate on several issues before the California Horse Racing Board, and was part of the negotiating team which helped bring the low-takeout Players Pick 5 to the state. He was featured in the 2007 documentary, Players: The Blue Collar Gambler. In 2014, he won the inaugural Ron Rippey Award for Handicapping Media for the best published article about handicapping. His eclectic resume also includes serving in Vietnam, writing television sitcoms, playing professional tennis in India, and doing standup comedy in California.