265: Fake Science
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WBEZChicago, it is another hour of high-minded radio broadcasting distributed by Public Radio International, which is to say it's American life, which is to say hello, it's post-time. [MUSIC] It's opening day at Arlington Racetrack, just outside Chicago. And maybe because of the rain, maybe because not that many adults can come out to the track in the middle of a weekday, there are just four guys, regulars, in one of the rooms reserved for regulars, four guys in a spacious room with, but have to be 20 television monitors. The way we measure these horses is very, it's very mathematical and very scientific. This is Roger Weiss, really, that's his name, Mr. Weiss, a guy who makes his living betting on the horses, a kind of disciplined guy who gives the impression that maybe his goatee and his clothes never get messy. What I do is, each race, you see all these marks on my program? These are tracking of where the horse was on the turn, okay? So I keep track of where every horse was on the turn, I keep track of the wind, the direction, the velocity, I time every race. Mr. Weiss shows me a product called Therograp, which is basically a computerized analysis and printout of speed ratings and histories for each horse, and a cheat sheet that he made for himself with other data, which gets surprisingly precise and technical. So like, the horse is three wide, do you think about the laws of physics? The horse that's three wide is running a greater distance, okay? We factor that in mathematically. We disagree a lot. In fact, all of these guys disagree with me most of the time. Mike is retired from the post office, and his table is the messiest one in the room. Three of the guys here on opening day, Craig, Jeff, and Mr. Weiss, I'll do this very technical analysis to make their bets. Mike is the outcast. I have my own system. My system, you know, I find a bet in favor to the law when you end up losing money. Most of my horses are in the 20-30 to one-shot range, so I don't bet a lot of races every day. Fitting only long shots makes them really different from Jeff, who puts a lot of bets out there, looking for a small percentage return. Adam Craig, who plays more favorites, and whoever hears Mike describing his system to me and then turns to me and says, "You ever read the book once we'll over the Cuckoo's nest?" That's Mike's system. And in the eighth race, I get to see Mike's system in action. Well, this is my best bet of the day, his interest worth in the eighth. Hey, Mike, why is that your best bet? I like the trader. I don't see, but I don't really -- it might not even be because he's going to be -- he might be too short for me. So it's won't be good enough. Right, if the odds are not good enough, I'm going to lay off the race. We watched the race on the TV monitors. Intrinsic worth is wearing the number five and comes out of the gate poorly. The five broke bad. Right now he's running -- where's he running?
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