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Capper's
Corner Half the Race is Out of
Your Control (Part 4) 6----MORNING LINES and
ODDS Weekly Racing Quote "Every racing circuit has its overbet connections. This goes for trainers and jockeys. Always remember, even the highest percentage jockeys and trainers (Baze/Hollendorfer and the like) hover around 25% wins. They lose 75% of the time... the public sends these connections to the post frequently as false favorites. Steve Fierro, The Four Quarters of Horse Investing The Capper's New Features For more information on The Capper, click here. Note: The features are displayed in reverse chronological order, with the newest additions on the top of this page. •Added a new icon to the icon bar and a new menu choice to the View menu: DIRP. This stands for Download, Import, Recalculate and Print new races. In my ongoing effort to reduce all human endeavor to one click of the mouse, the DIRP icon is a milestone. I now sometimes say I'm going to "DIRP" the races rather than handicap them -- it's becoming part of my personal lexicon.
When you click the DIRP icon, the Download form will appear, with a slight difference. (Although first you may get prompted as to whether you want The Capper to process your Spot Play Breakdowns.) Instead of "Download Selected Files" and "Close", the buttons on the Download form say "DIRP" and "Cancel DIRP":
After you've selected your files for download (or accepted the pre-selected ones), you just click the DIRP button. That's it -- just walk away from it. It's still not really one-click handicapping -- there are actually still at least two clicks. (I'll work on that.) But it's a great process if you want The Capper to do everything overnight so you'll have your reports in the morning. •4/26/2004 •The Spot Plays tab of the Setup dialog has a few more settings in the bottom-left corner. These help with the processing and printing of your Spot Play Breakdowns. (This process happens, if you choose, while recalculating your models, or if you go to the Spot Play Breakdown tab of the General Reports dialog and click the button.) First, these new settings allow you to choose whether your Spot Play Breakdowns will be processed in alphabetical order or by starting with the one that's had the longest time since it was last processed. The latter choice is the default, and the one I suggest you stick with. Second, you can choose the amount of time you let The Capper take when it starts processing your breakdowns. It default to 4 Hours, which is probably about right for most users.:
This new feature is for the convenience of those of you who like to import, recalculate and print new races at night while you're sleeping. You can now answer Yes to the prompt that asks you if you want to process your breakdowns. The Capper will import your files, recalculate your models, process your breakdowns for 4 hours (or however long you set it), and then print out your new races. This way, all your races should be waiting for you in the morning and your most out-of-date spot plays will have been updated. If The Capper is still processing when you get up in the morning, that's a sign to set the "Time Allowed to Process" prompt to something shorter. Remember that this Process and Print Spot Play Breakdowns process doesn't just create the spot play breakdown reports that you look at. It also compiles the statistics that the PQ Spot Plays report uses. That's one of the reasons it's good to keep your breakdowns as up-to-date as possible. This new feature should help with that, even as the list of spot plays in The Capper grows ever larger. •4/26/2004 Tech Tips: Using The Capper •Effective
Payback •Progress Report on the New Spot Plays •The Importance of the Charts When Using Spot Plays •You can email a spot play chart to someone. To do this, while the chart is on your screen, click the Show Editor button. Click the Export tab, choose "as PDF", and click the Send button. Fill out the "To" field in your email program and send the email. Using this method, it's easy to share charts. •You can enlarge a certain area of the Spot Play Charts by dragging your mouse pointer over the area you want enlarged in an "L" pattern. Be sure to hold down your left mouse button while dragging the L pattern. To bring the chart back to full size, drag a backwards L pattern. •To keep The Capper running as fast as possible, keep your database lean and mean. The best way to do this is to delete your race data as soon as possible. After you've downloaded, imported and recalculated the binary charts for a particular day, you can delete the old race data from that day. Here's what I do: every day, before I download yesterday's binaries and today's race files, I go into the Delete Race Data tab of the Utilities dialog and use the calendar to delete all race data from the day before yesterday and before. Then I quit The Capper, start the Database Utility and hit the Compact/Repair button. That compacts the database and helps speed it up significantly. Then, when I download and Import, Recalculate and Print New Races, everything goes really fast. With a relatively new computer, each race file will generally import in about half a second. Also, note that I pretty much never delete model data (using the Delete Model Data tab) -- only race data. The Prize-Free Handicapping Contest Join in! Here are the rules: You pick one horse per weekend (either Saturday or Sunday) to win and post it on The Grandstand message board (before race-time). We keep track of the flat bet Return On Investment, win percentage and other nifty stats for each contestant. If more than one horse is mentioned, the first one mentioned is taken as the selection. The profitable handicappers (as measured by flat ROI) are listed on the leader board on NetCapper's home page. The top handicapper (the Handicapping God) has his name shamelessly flashed all over the page as long as he retains his top ranking. The Handicapping God also receives the coveted NotaPrize. The NotaPrize is invisible, ineffable, and completely without weight, worth or substance, but is much sought after nonetheless. Weekend Recap: Jed
takes the weekend off but maintains his lead, while longshotlouie holds
second place despite a loss. Just off the leader board, Zman hits a
winner at Pleasanton as Vicente goes gate-to-wire in a 2YO MSW race and
pays $7.20. Racing Headlines
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