in bravely posting his weekly tips in a thread below, Becareful alluded to the "forum jinx" - a subject close to my heart.

to enlighten those who have yet to fall foul of the Jinx...

there are basically two types of Jinx -
a) the "I'll open my big mouth for a one off selection" Jinx and
b) the " here is a system I have been working on" Jinx.

Type A is pretty straight forward and I have had the pleasure of falling for this one myself -
about a month ago I opened my Big Fat Mouth and declared that I would be putting my money that night on Double Identity as its record made it a certainty.
Before that night DI had run a place in something like 15 of its last 15 races, and has run a place in 4 out of 4 races since that night - but do you think the ************** could run a place on the night I had opened my Big Fat Mouth???
Nup, it ran 4th !!!!

And we see many members of the forum get brave and bring their systems to the group only to fall victim to the type B Jinx.
They put in lots of hard work, probably even make money from it and then they bring the system to the forum, and they are doomed...
there are two forms of the type B Jinx.
Sometimes the victim brings his system to the forum and from day 1 onwards everything unravels and the system chalks up a loss. Maybe for a day or two we are excited by the odd win, but sure enough the rest of the week will be doom and gloom and members will slowly and politely stop reading the selections and feel sorry for the victim.
But there is a nastier strain of the Jinx and this is when the poor victim puts up his selections and for the first week or two they actually make money.
The other forum members are delighted and start putting their own money on the tips and everyone is on a winner - or so they think!

But then the good old Jinx starts to work, slowly withering away the profits until the hard earnt POT slides towards zero and then becomes a LOT.
The original poster then has two choices, to slink away into the distance and hide, or to come back in a few days with a new identity so he can again grace the forums pages with courage.

It is a terrible thing this Jinx, it gets the best of us ultimately.

You could have a strike rate of 99%, but step up to the plate with your public selection and BANG - it will be the one that loses.

So, good luck Becareful, but really you should have known better and Been Careful.

Public selections always attract the Jinx,
there are many of us who have fallen foul to it in the past.

see ya
Every Topic







[ This Message was edited by: Every Topic on 2003-01-27 14:02 ]

Every Topic,

I carefully considered the jinx before posting but then decided it could work to my advantage. My theory is that I could either test the system for 6 months to see if it would hold up long term or just post the selections to the forum for a week. If the posted selections show a profit then I can be pretty confident it will work long term and I have just saved myself 5 months and 3 weeks of waiting!

Don't be afraid of the jinx - think of it as a accelerated testing process for any selection system!

:grin:

__________________
"Computers can do that????" - Homer Simpson

ah yes, very clever BC,
but now that you have blabbed it to all of us I suspect the Jinx will take down your number and make it even more painful.

havent checked today, but I hope it went alright for you...

see ya
Every Topic
p.s. you might be suffering from smoke inhalation, but we are suffering from heat exhaustion - jeez I'll be happy when summer is over - its definitely only for the young :smile:

Aaaah yes, the forum jinx, I know it well. More than a year ago I decided to post my "lays of the day" ie those that I thought were too short to be value. Could not believe how many of them that won during those few disastrous weeks, and the subsequent pasting (deserved or not) that I received.
But the jinx does not let you off lightly, for as soon as you stop posting you start to get it right again, and lose sleep over whether or not to post again......and BANG, as soon as you do, well you know what happens.

:grin:

I should have read this post before putting my selections on. Very poor day Saturday.

__________________
Regards,
Pete

Talking about jinx it's highly related to luck!

Someone sent me the link below. Worth a consideration.

On the topic of ins and outs, I wonder if there is a sort of wave that people 'surf' on. And whether there is a skill (not just a stake) that's important to consider. Where the surfer tries to make the highs outperform the dips. (In another lingo they are called streaks).

http://news.sify.com/cgi-bin/sifyne...20611&page_no=1

this leads onto another very important subject, does In form or Out of form exist in the racing animal.
Most would believe it does, if you were to use a mechanical measure that would provide a rating per start,then find the Mean of its Life to Date history, you then split the past starts say into odds and evens eg start 1 is odd start 2 is even and so on, so i have effectively split the data if you averaged the the now two groups of data, and compared it to the overal average..what would the answer be..once you understand this ..you can then start to unravel the secrets of "performance envolopes"

[ This Message was edited by: woof43 on 2003-01-27 19:28 ]

the thing that makes it work is faith.
the physical or mechanic measurement is a hazardous tool to use.
on saturday i had senate lease minus 8 lengths on my weight measure which was very good.
today i had typhoon plus 10 lengths which was 18 lengths between the two of them
they both won.
if you work from a mechanical measure its hard to know a good thing except that when the horse is backed they usually win. king lotto and sir chuckle were two good examples today.the inner workings of the horse or powers that control it are very hard to predict.
both senate lease and typhoon had listed and group form in the past.
in typhoon's race only typhoon and coloseum had past listed form.
typhoon was also down in class. a bit of faith in horses with past listed form can be helpful. but i really dont know which race they will win.
from last sunday to friday i dont recall getting a collect.
so dont feel too bad about having a bad day.
they always happen the day after you thing you are getting better at the game.

The mechanical measurement is to make sure you don't include any situational variables and keeps things on a level playing field, if yu understand how standard deviation works you can get a good idea of why there are peaks and troughs in performances. Just knowing that 68% of a runners performance will fall within 1 standard dev provides a good starting point.

I should have listened to you Every Topic - the jinx bit me and bit me hard! The ratings system I was posting from gives selections roughly divided into two groups. Prior to this week the "Top Selections" had an extraordinary strike rate and POT whilst the "Normal Selections" still had a good strike rate but only a moderate POT. In addition there are generally a few selections that I discard or treat as longshots because although they technically qualify they have one or more factors that generally indicate a poor bet (eg. a large field size, 1000m race, etc). Being a cautious person I decided to post the Top Selections only and, of course, they fell in a hole but the Normal Selections showed a good profit during the week so for yesterday I decided to post all the selections except the "longshots" - you can guess what happened - both the normal and top selections failed but the 4 "longshots" I excluded resulted in two winners a 2nd and a 3rd.

I give up - the jinx is too strong!

__________________
"Computers can do that????" - Homer Simpson