I'm very impressed. The author of 'Betting For A Living' has produced another ground-breaking, intelligent and insightful analysis of UK horse racing. It is another 'how to win at racing' book and early on I wondered if Mordin was covering ground from his earlier text. I was wrong. There's much fresh thought here. As with 'Betting For A Living' the author builds on the work of international handicappers. He's less concerned with Beyer, Quirin and Ainslie this time, highlighting instead classic studies from the Kelly Criterion (1956) to multinomial logistic regression (MLR) handicapping models developed by Bolton and Chapman (1986) and William Benter (1994). The first edition of 'Winning Without Thinking' includes extensive appendices reproducing these papers in their entirety. They are harder to read than Mordin but are critically relevant to his systems approach.
The systems angle will come as no surprise. The author came up with horse racing systems on a weekly basis for the Weekender for ten years. He is as innovative and maverick as ever in these pages. He argues cogently at one point that an additional weight greater than 117 pounds is likely to slow down a racehorse while less than this figure may have no impact. Perhaps that was just my reading of it. There are enough systems suggested here to make the game look as easy as the witty title suggests. Readers are unlikely to be fooled and ultimately the book makes one wonder aghast at the sheer work and endeavour that beating the bookies might take. This is not a criticism, of course, but a recommendation that the book is a serious study which skirts a little around the issue of probability perhaps but highlights and reasons as to the transient and fragile nature of such winning systems.
The overall approach of this book is similar to that of David-Lee Priests's 'The Betting Edge', a worthy enough text in this field but Priest lauds Mordin as his inspiration and the foremost author in the field of horse racing selection and betting.
A strategy of sorts is sketched out in the book. 'Think outside the box - get data - analyse data' is fundamentally the formula here but it's also made very clear that such analysis is near-useless without detailed understanding of the horse racing domain. 'Winning Without Thinking' is not a book about the methodologies of quantitative data analysis but it does lead on to the era of data science. There is no maths or science in Mordin's text to dissuade readers but the appendices discuss some quite heavy machine learning operations.
Just as 'Betting For A Living' advanced UK handicapping knowledge by about a decade overnight I think Nick probably did it again with this book. In some ways the book reads like just another manual telling punters how to win a fortune. A deeper read of it, taking on board the general approach it suggests, actually finds it to be a clear and very intelligent guide to the work of generating profit by betting on racehorses.
Right then, back to my Lucky 31s...
