Horseplayers: Life at the Track (Ted McClelland)
Chapter 20: The One-Eyed Man is King
McClelland closes his book with a summary of his takeaways from spending a year at Thoroughbred tracks in Chicago as a horseplayer, including these two takes:
The day I didn't bet was the day I truly stopped being a gambler and became a horseplayer. There it was: Learning the game had nothing to do with handicapping insights. It was all about licking the Fear of Regret, after you'd been beaten up and cleaned out by the pari-mutuel machine so many times that you finally arrived at an emotional place that allowed you to tell the track, "I don't need to bet. I've lost hundreds of races. I'm jaded. Give me a race I can get excited about, a race where the odds favor me, or the wallet stays shut."
Now, at last, I'd discovered the dark heart and soul of the game: It wasn't about predicting the behavior of the horses. It was about predicting the behavior of the other gamblers and exploiting their mistakes.
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