Race Posting Moving Forward

[Bob Harris]

Hello Wizards,

While we try not to discourage the majority of posting, we do seem to need some guidelines since Michael's passing regarding the types of races that we promote. The races which Michael used as examples in his videos showed what he considered the proper use of Black Magic and ValueCapper and concentrated on winnowing out the simple, lower risk races from the cluttered, higher risk ones.

How you choose to use your tools privately is your business...on the forum, we want to see race examples which communicate Michael's vision. To that end, please refrain from posting races which advance:

1) Horses out of the ARC. Betting horses below random is extremely risky...I never once saw Michael do it except to complete exotics, never a win bet.

2) Red races. This is a pace / position based methodology...it's hard enough to project pressure when everyone has running lines. If multiple horses have no usable information, those projections are impossible. If you want to bet a red race because of other factors, be my guest...in the forum, we need to promote races which use the software as it was intended.

3) Lower than VCP. The moderators will give some leeway on the value topic but not a lot. We want to be excited about bets, not horses. We can't obviously control the odds of our bets after we've placed them but we never want to get ourselves into the habit of liking a horse so much that we're willing to take significantly less than VCP. Michael once told me that the algorithm for the VCP odds took more time to perfect than any other part of ValueCapper...it was extremely important to him. If you want to point out a horse with 10-1 VCP odds and give a reason why you think it's still a great value at 8-1, fine. Start pushing 5-1 odds and the moderators will begin editing.

I think that pretty much covers the recent issues we've been having. If there are other race examples being posted which confuse more than they help, please bring them to our attention.

Thanks for your cooperation,

The Wizard Forum Moderators

[swanson]

I prefer this approach to posting a lot. Thanks for making the announcement, and sharing as to why Moderators prefer it this way Bob.

Happy Holidays everyone!

Swanson