Hermes, I think you understood this situation perfectly. It is interesting that you ascribe the 33% chance not to the horse, but on the handicapper's ability to pick it! This is food for thought and I will indeed consider this idea further.

Becareful, well done! You picked up on a point I had hoped someone would have twigged onto. You said,

"...but if you ran the race again any one of these (conditions) could be different and the horse may win."

Rerunning becomes outside the parameters of this problem, as we want to consider the selections chances if the race was REPEATED, not rerun. In this case, I would say the winner is still likely to win again close to 100% of the time. The free will and choices of the contenders are likely to throw up different circumstances; but the chance of the winner winning again this time, in my opinion, is only a few percent off 100%. This, though, may vary depending on how clear his likely win is. The clearer the win, the closer to 100% of the time the rerunning winner will win again. Hard to get across, but a valid argument I think.

In short, there seems to be two bases (or philosophies) we all tend to bet by - finding the "definite" winner (direct approach) or finding the probable winner based on a statistical approach. I'm sure both approaches have their validity, but how they relate to each other is what interests me here.

Thanks guys,

~Lenny


[ This Message was edited by: Lenny on 2004-01-11 02:54 ]