NHCQ – Analysis and Lessons Learned

(This post got long, so I will post a briefer summary shortly.)

Results

Here is the final leaderboard – I finished 3rd and qualified for the year-end contest!

---

---

Manifestation of Intents

First and foremost for me, this result is a culmination of many, many years of intent – my intent to combine intuitive knowing with logical analysis in my beloved sport of horse racing. I know now I am a leader in this field, not just for handicapping, but in general – how to effectively and creatively combine left-brained logical analysis with right-brained intuitive knowing to bring about the desired manifestations.
It is the next logical step in my journey, and I am proud of myself for creating it, for doing the inner work to bring it about.

This particular contest was a manifestation of particular intents of mine.

First, I intended to qualify for the year-end NHC.
A week before the contest, I was not in a place where I believed this could happen.
But thanks to some encouragement from Marty, I decided to spend some time working on my vibration on this subject – I focused on the feeling of winning, of qualifying, of how much fun that is, if how it felt to win, and (secondarily) be an example to others.
I spent a day or so on this, which I call shifting my vibration.
I believe the winning outcome was a direct result of this intent.

Based on my reading about these contests, I decided that I wanted to hit 3 longshots in the 12 races, where longshots are loosely defined as horses 8-1 or greater.
So I made that a strong intent of mine.
And that is almost exactly what happened – I hit 12-1 and 9-1 winners, and an 11-1 shot finished 2nd by a head. These 3 horses’ payoffs made up 83% of my contest dollars, so were the reason I qualified.

Detailed Analysis

I did some analysis of my results, and it was eye-opening 😉

Summary of Contest Picks

In the 12 races, I picked 3 winners, and 4 second place finishes (i.e., 7 of 12 placed).

The winners’ payoffs were $4.50, $26.60 and $20.20 for $2 bet; the place payoffs ranged from $2.40 to $11.80.

The average field size for the 12 races was 9.25, so one would expect 11% (1.3) winners and 22% place horses (2.6) out of 12 picking at random.

Summary of Intuitive/ARV

The top Targ CR ARV horse finished first 4 times out of 12, including all of the above 3 horses, in addition to the 4th winner (whom I did not pick for the contest) who paid $3.20.

Randomly one would expect only 1.3 winners picking this way, so the top ARV pick won more than 3 times than expected.

The Return-On-Investment (ROI) for the top ARV pick was +1.27, meaning one would make a 125% profit (more than double) on flat amounts bet on each top ARV choice in the 12 races.
The randomly expected result is the track take, or about -0.17 (17% loss).

I made the best use of my intuition in selecting contest picks in several ways.

The primary way was using the top ARV choice as my contest pick, of course.
But I also made use of my intuition in disregarding top ARV choices that did not feel like good picks to me – this was also me paying attention to my guidance.
In the 1st, 9th and 11th races, I ignored the top ARV choice – and these three horses finished last, 8th and 9th.

So this is the best way to use my intuition and ARV – to consider my feeling about the ARV selections, picking the ones that feel right, and discarding the ones that don’t.
This is much better than blindly picking ARV top choices.

In addition to top ARV choices, I also considered highly-rated Targ CRs as worthy of extra consideration.

These are EXCELLENT results for intuitive picks!

Summary of Logical

It gets even more amazing to me here.

I rated each horse as either an A (highest), B, C or X (throwout) logical contender.
I did not formally attempt to name a single horse (if more than one A) as the best logical horse.

Of the 111 horses total in the contest, I rated 22 of them A or B – and all 12 of the winners came from this set of horses!
That is, 100% of the winners came from a pool of only 42 of 111 or 38% of the starters.
Contrast that to the C and X contenders – none of the winners came from the 69 C/X horses (62% of starters).

For A contenders alone, I had 9 winners of 21 starters – an amazing 43%!
Since the average win odds of these 9 winners was about 3 to 1, the win ROI for logical A horses was an excellent +.70, meaning one would get about 70% profit on blind win bets on these horses.

So I did a GREAT JOB in my logical analysis!

Summary of Logical and Intuitive – Putting Them Together

This is my particular primary focus in all of this work, and the results of this contest strongly validated my approach.

The ARV-predicted longshots that were key to my winning the contest were also highly rated logical contenders – so it was the combination of intuition and logic that won me the contest.
Horse that were either high ARV/Targ CR and low logical rating or high logical and low ARV did not do as well.

So that is my biggest lesson learned, and how I will aggressively attack the rest of the NHC contest, and my horse race betting in general from here on – to do my usual excellent logical analysis, while combining with ARV and intuitive feelings/knowing – that is the best way for me.