Race
Track Diary, Entry Number
Twenty-Three
23 – Billy Budd’s (Feb 14, 2026)
Introduction
This blog and some following blogs are sections from an informal
diary of “visits to the race-track” at a particular time and
place, by a person who has followed the races with varying levels of
participation over a long period. These relate primarily to some
visits to the track and/or off-track betting venues in the 2025
period and onward. They contain observations about the activity,
both specific and general. Although these remarks are personal, they
also reflect general cultural and historical trends, as they have
impacted horse-racing, wagering and culture in general.
The setting is Edmonton, Alberta, Canada (population of about one
million plus). However, I imagine that the observations would apply
to many places in the world, as they are a reflection of how changing
trends in technology, globalization and culture in general have
affected this ancient and honourable activity of horse-racing.
For now, I will use what I call “polished point-form” for the
narrative.
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23 – Billy Budd’s (Feb 14, 2026)
Once again, I entered upon the trip to the horses (via off-track
betting) with a feeling of uncertainty. My winning streak had been
cut short last time out – so, which way would the goddess of the
streaks turn now? As it turned out, it was to be a day of some
interesting luck-related events.
The place was fairly busy (the horse part, not the pub in general)
for the lunch special.
To begin with, here is a run-down of the races at Santa Anita, the
bunch that I handicap seriously.
We got to Budd’s in good time, with plenty of time to handicap
and bet the first race. It was a maiden race for 3 year old
fillies, so the horses didn’t have much in the way of past
perfomance history. Nonetheless, I threw a bit of money at the 9
horse, which came in second, being nipped at the wire. Loss
number one.
The second race was for fillies and mares, 4 years old and up.
The horse my system liked went off at ridiculous odds (1 to 5) so
I took a flyer on a longshot that the system liked. I was right
to skip the favorite, as it came in second and paid $2.10 to place
on a $2.00 bet. Frankly, it always amazes me to see a horse bet
down that low. The winner paid $8.60, but only $2.40 to place, so
clearly the crowd had it pegged to come in second. My long-shot
ended up way way down the track, so that was another loss.
For the third race, my system liked the 4 horse and it went off a
half-decent odds, so I put some money on it. It led for most of
the race, but then got beat out towards the wire, coming in
second. Another loss, but a near-run thing.
The system also liked the 4 horse in the fourth race. The 3 and 4
horse dueled it out in the stretch, with it looking like the 3
would overtake. But my horse really dug in to take back the lead
and hang on for the win. That was nice to watch, especially as it
paid off at about 5 to 1. That put me solidly into the black for
the day, thus far.
The fifth race was a funny one. It was on the turf and included a
downhill grade, in the turf course. Given those factors, I
decided to skip the race. One of Beyer’s books said that turf
races are not easy to pick, using primarily speed-related
measures. Plus, a race-course with a downhill grade was a total
mystery to me. At any rate, 2 of the three horses that my system
like came in first and second, both paying good money. If such a
race happens again, perhaps I will give it a chance.
The sixth race was another maiden race for 3-year olds. Hardly
any of these horses had any record to speak of, other than
workouts and one-shot races, where they did very little. Given
those factors, I decided to skip that race too. My system liked
the only horse that had a substantial record (how could it not?),
with a string of seconds and thirds. It ran true-to-form in this
race as well, coming in second, though at at decent price.
For the seventh race, my system had a fairly clear preference for
the 4 horse. It was going off a pretty good odds, so I gave it a
shot. It came in third, so another loss.
The 8th race was for 4 and 5 year old maidens.
Basically, these are horses that hadn’t been earning their keep,
so it was tough to pick between them. About half had never even
finished in the money. Given that, I skipped this race too. That
turned out to be a good choice, as the win and place horses had no
relevant form, under my system.
Like the 8th, the 9th was another maiden
race, for 4 and 5 year olds. Like that race, the horses had
little history to go on. Therefore, I skipped this race as well.
Again, that turned out to be a good decision, as the winner was
unpickable, by my system.
So, I bet 5 races, skipped 4 and won 1. However that winner paid
well enough to pay for all the losses and then some. So, no
complaining from me.
I mentioned earlier that it was an interesting day for luck. Here
are a few examples:
About mid-afternoon, a fellow came into the horseracing area.
Someone asked how he did. "Did you win?"
"Yes."
"How much was it worth?"
"About $12000, a superfecta."
I turned to my brother Craig and said "Do you think that’s
true?"
The guy next to me turned and said: "Oh yeah, it’s true. I
know him. He’s a Chinese guy, just like me."
"Oh. Well, that’s awesome for him."
After the Santa Anita races were done, I remembered that I had
picked a random race in Australia the previous weekend, just before
we left. I decided I really ought to put it through the machine,
though I wasn’t expecting anything.
So, I put the ticket in the machine, and out popped a voucher for
nearly 10 times what the ticket was worth! Well, let me tell you,
that was unexpected.
Craig was rather blase about it, as he said it had happened to him
on several occasions in the past.
Well, that’s ok for him, but to me it was nothing short of a
minor miracle. I have never considered myself particulary lucky,
having to work hard for anything I got in life. Others would
probably smile at that and say, "no, no, you’ve been plenty
lucky."
I don’t know if the following story qualifies as lucky, but it is
an interesting bit of statistics:
Some time in the later afternoon, one of the waitresses dropped a
glass, but it did not shatter. I suppose that was lucky for her.
But looking at some of my earlier diary entries, during visit #2 a
waitress had dropped a glass, and during visti #15 a waitress had
dropped a glass. Now, same thing for visit #23.
This may be an interesting example of a Poisson distribution.
That is a peculiar statistical distribution that happens with
relatively rare events. It turns out that these rare events are
actually quite predictable. It is sometimes referred to as "the
law of small numbers", as opposed to "the law of large
numbers", with which most people are familiar.
This has a horse angle. In the 19th century, it was
noticed by the Prussian military that officers were sometimes
kicked in the head by their horses, with fatal results. Upon
studying the data, a clever statistician noticed a pattern, which
indicated that something other than random chance was at work.
So,
I suppose the same principle applies to waitresses dropping
glasses and trays. Perhaps if one followed it long enough, he
could produce a nice graph, as the mathematician Ladislaus
Bortkiewicz did, in the late 1800s.
The fact that February 14 is Valentine’s Day was also of some
interest:
There was an older married couple having a lunch date. Apparently,
the man had very limited vision, if he had any eyesight at all.
But the woman guided him along, as he used a walker, even taking
him to the washroom, declaring "out of my way, he’s blind
and I’m taking him to the bathroom." I guess that was kind
of romantic.
Then, there was the lady known as Jill (note: I am not using her
actual name here).
This was a lone female better, a somewhat older lady, but well
dressed and fairly classy, one might say.
She was generally rather quiet, other than having a bit of a spat
with another table when we first got there, which the waitress
soon smoothed over. I don’t know what caused it, though.
Eventually an older, rather rotund (and probably drunk) fellow
started chatting her up. It was funny to listen to (you couldn’t
not listen to it, as he was not exactly the silent type). It
reminded me of scenes from decades ago, when some smooth operator
would hit on a girl in a bar.
There was the playing dumb stuff: "Tell me how this
horseracing business works, Jill. What horse should I bet on?".
(later it turned out that he was aquainted with some of the local
harness-racing people, as was she).
Then there were the effusive compliments: "Oh, you play golf?
And you got a hole-in-one in golf? That’s amazing, Jill! You
must be a great golfer!" (actually it is amazing and she
might well be quite a good golfer).
Then there was the shared experience: "Oh wow, Jill the horse
you picked won! We are winners!" ( I think that really
happened)
He called some of his pals over and the entire group chatted her
up. I expect that some of those guys were just playing along, as
it seemed like the first guy might have been a boss of some sort
and this was his crew on their day off.
But she was good. She seemed to be glad to talk to some people.
And she knew when to bring in the "my boyfriend" stuff,
to cool the fellow’s ardour.
Eventually, the group of males left for greener fields. She
stayed behind and concentrated on the bucket-pullers, as did Craig
and I.
For the harness-races at Woodbine/Mohawk, I was exploring a betting
angle When a horse drops in odds by a large margin, it is almost a
lock. That is old racetrack lore, but I had quantified the odds
drops, at least in a small sample. So, I wanted to test that.
However, I discovered that they angle had a complication. It turned
out that no matter how carefully one follows the odds, as the race
nears, there can still be large odds-drops beyond what is shown on
the screen. That said, the angle seems to still be pretty good,
based on my rather limited sample.
As usual, Craig and I played some rolling Pick-3 bets. We were
alive to a couple, in the final leg, but both went sour. That was
especially annoying in one case, since we had a 22 to 1 horse in the
second leg, which would have meant a nice payday. However, the
favorite (which we had) ran a pathetic race in the final leg of the
Pick-3. It didn’t catch up to the truck at the start, then ran
way wide, then died completely.
So it goes at the harness-races.
About then, the Austalian horses came on the screen, which meant it
was surely time to go. But given my lucky win at the Australian
track, I will no longer call them "the devil-horses of
Australia", but rather "the lucky red-eared Australian
horses of esteem".
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And here are a couple of short books you might like.
A Dark Horse
In “A
Dark Horse”, a gambler’s desire to hit a big win seems to lead
him to make a Faustian bargain with a supernatural evil. Or is
it all just a string of unnaturally good luck?
The
story is just $0.99 U.S. (equivalent in other currencies) and about
8000 words. It is also available on Kindle Unlimited and is
occasionally on free promotion.
U.S.:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01M9BS3Y5
U.K.:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01M9BS3Y5
Germany:
https://www.amazon.de/dp/B01M9BS3Y5
France:
https://www.amazon.fr/dp/B01M9BS3Y5
Italy:
https://www.amazon.it/dp/B01M9BS3Y5
Netherlands:
https://www.amazon.nl/dp/B01M9BS3Y5
Spain:
https://www.amazon.es/dp/B01M9BS3Y5
Japan:
https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/B01M9BS3Y5
India:
https://www.amazon.in/dp/B01M9BS3Y5
Mexico:
https://www.amazon.com.mx/dp/B01M9BS3Y5
Brazil:
https://www.amazon.com.br/dp/B01M9BS3Y5
Canada:
https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B01MDMY2BR
Australia:
https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B01M9BS3Y5
Here’s an
interesting review from Goodreads
(BTW, the writer has never met the reviewer and was not even aware of
the review until very recently – You can look up the review on
Goodreads, if you like)
A Dark Horse
Every gambler is
bound to run out of luck eventually, right?
By far my
favourite type of horror is psychological horror. I was quite pleased
with how Mr. Olausen frightened his audience without spilling a
single drop of blood or so much as hinting at anything gory. He knew
exactly what hints to drop for us that made us deliciously dread the
next scene simply by throwing out hints about who or what the dark
horse might actually represent. This is the kind of stuff I love
getting scared by, especially as Halloween approaches.
It
would have been helpful to have more character development in this
short story. While I certainly wouldn’t expect to see as much time
spent on this as I would for a full-length novel, I did have trouble
connecting to the main characters due to how little I knew about them
and how much their personalities seemed to remain the same no matter
what happened to them. If not for this issue, I would have felt
comfortable choosing a much higher rating as the plot itself was well
done.
I must admit to not knowing much about gambling at
all, so I appreciated the brief explanations the narrator shared
about how placing bets works and why some people have so much trouble
walking away from a bet. While I will leave it up to experts on these
topics to say how accurate everything was, I did enjoy learning more
about the main character’s addiction and what he hoped to gain from
betting on just one more game or race. It gave me a stronger sense of
empathy for folks in his position.
A Dark Horse – A
Gothic Tale was a deliciously chilling story for the Halloween season
and beyond.
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And here is an account of a summer job on the railroad, during my
undergraduate years.
One Summer
Working on the Railroad
What follows is anaccount
of a few weeks one long-ago summer, when I was 19 and was working for
the Canadian National Railway (CNR) on a railroad construction gang,
in the wilds of north-central British Columbia, Canada.
The journal is in the form of a
letter, that was never sent. Decades later, I think it has an
interesting historical resonance. At times I come off like a callow
youth – I plead guilty as charged. I swore a lot more in those days
than I do now, but in places the writing is surprisingly good, at
least in my humble opinion. And the story has a compelling narrative
arc.
There were a lot of interesting and
dramatic events that occurred – a number of industrial accidents
being the most serious. There were also some colorful characters on
the crew, which resulted in some dramatic and at times amusing
conflicts and altercations. I perhaps flatter myself by including
myself in that number. Or perhaps I condemn myself – I’m not
sure.
So, if you want to be reminded of
one of those summer jobs that was kind of life-changing, read on. My
story may just kick-start some memories of your own.
The
memoir/journal is about 9,000 words, a length that can usually be
read in an hour or so. It is priced at 99 cents U.S. (equivalent in
other currencies) and is free on Kindle Unlimited. Periodically, it
will be offered as a free promotion.
U.S.: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CN661P8Z
UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CN661P8Z
Canada: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0CN661P8Z
Australia: https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B0CN661P8Z
India: https://www.amazon.in/dp/B0CN661P8Z
Germany: https://www.amazon.de/dp/B0CN661P8Z
France: https://www.amazon.fr/dp/B0CN661P8Z
Spain: https://www.amazon.es/dp/B0CN661P8Z
Italy: https://www.amazon.it/dp/B0CN661P8Z
Netherlands: https://www.amazon.nl/dp/B0CN661P8Z
Japan: https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/B0CN661P8Z
Brazil: https://www.amazon.com.br/dp/B0CN661P8Z
Mexico: https://www.amazon.com.mx/dp/B0CN661P8Z
