All of the pieces of my handicapping process are in place yet I still continue to miss open goals?
Creating the aide memoir I described in my last post (I have enhanced it since) has helped but barriers to success are in my opinion down to the mental process between my ears and not handicapping technique.
Why do I know this is the case? As all good handicappers should do, I allot time to review my pre-race assumptions post race basically to ask myself the question, what did I miss?
The answer more often than not is I rarely overlook the winner as serious contender … on paper.
No, the problem is when handicapping a race, I create a fixed image of what I believe the winner(s) is/are and build a case to match my assumption or conformation bias. Once this bias is in place our learned cognitive psychologists will say you are destined to fail in arriving at an unbiased (no pun intended) solution because.
- Mind-sets tend to be quick to form but resistant to change. It’s therefore difficult to look at information from different perspectives
- Initial exposure to blurred or ambiguous stimuli interferes with accurate perception even after more and better information becomes available. (The reason why I tend to stick to my original choice even though my selection is drifting badly on Betfair).
- New information is assimilated to existing images. (Non-runners alter the draw bias. Should I not revaluate my original assumptions when this occurs?)
My tissues, selection and staking as a consequence of removing pins from mental hand grenades are rendered useless with obvious results. Unfortunately I’ve been down this path before.
However I have gained a vast amount of experience since discovering the hidden traps of the human mind and I am more confident in the sources of data used to evaluate the merits of each horse.
With that I can use different approaches in making decision in the confidence that I’m not second guessing the data.
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Tags: Inner Thoughts