Readings: Ainslie
“Successful horse playing is a solitary existence. The less solitary it gets, the less successful it gets. If you make the error of getting into social relations with the dreamers, grifters, angle shooters, alleged ‘insiders,’ and crack-brained theorists who clutter up the track, you can’t concentrate on your work because of the din. So you keep to yourself. It gets lonesome. I like money, but not enough to stay lonesome all year around.
“Also, it’s a long, demanding day. When you’re playing at Monmouth Park, for example, you can get the next day’s Morning Telegraph at the Long Branch railroad station at 9:30 p.m. Sometimes the train is late, so you sit in the station and watch the hard-eyed trainers and grooms and mutuel clerks and jockeys muttering their jargon at each other. Finally the paper arrives and you drive back to the motel with it and pour yourself a drink and read through the past performance records to see if any authentically living creature is likely to compete on the following afternoon. You finally go to sleep without seeing the thing through, because you are worn out from having been on razor’s edge since seven that morning.
“At seven the next morning you deploy paper, pen, past performances, and hot coffee and put in two or three hours of grindingly intense study, trying to separate the sheep from the goats. If it’s a decent card, you may find three or four possibly playable races in one or two of which a single horse may seem outstanding. In the other two or three promising races, you may be able to narrow the possibilities to two or three or four horses. Nothing left to do now but take the sun, if any, until noon or thereabouts, when you go to the track. On your arrival, the printed program and the supplementary announcements over the public-address system tell you which horses have been scratched from the running and which jockey assignments have been changed. Sometimes it improves the animal’s chances.
“About twenty-five minutes before the start of the first possibly playable race of the day, you go to the paddock to see how the horses behave while being saddled up and walked around. Here you determine whether the best horse in the race is in shape to run up to its standard. Often it is not, and you recognize this. The process gives you supreme advantage over the 20,000 unfortunates who have not come to the paddock (and would be helpless if they did) but are still in their seats, or eating hot dogs, or drinking beer, or hanging around the mutuel windows, or consulting 50-cent tip sheets, or trading lies. Several times a week the crowd bets so heavily on a physically unsound animal that it becomes one of the favorites in its race.
“So you make your final decision at the paddock. You decide to bet a horse, or occasionally to bet two horses, or to pass the race entirely. You may go through a whole tedious day without making a single bet. The bets you make are large because only small money can be made from small bets. You are calm and serene (you think) because you know that the percentages are with you. You are, after all, a habitual winner. But after a day of this kind of concentration, in a setting of noise and confusion and tension, with horses losing that should win and horses winning that should lose, there’s not much left of you.
“It’s a hard life. But an exciting hobby.” — From “The Compleat Horseplayer,” by Tom Ainslie
