Back during the Preakness, I ran across a post by WWN about TVG offering odds for Nyquist and a $100 deposit bonus. I decided to take a chance, and holy shit what a rabbit hole i wound up in.

TVG is one of the most addictive things I've ever gotten into in my life. It's the crack of horse race betting. Because it is literally going on all day long, all over the world. Australia and New Zealand late at night, South Africa early in the morning, the UK and Ireland in the late morning and early afternoon.

And then of course we have our American race tracks.

I stuck it out with the $100 I put in for a while, but I played very stupidly and didn't do enough research on the site to really take advantage of the deposit bonus. I thought I lost more than I did after the Preakness, and then got reckless with wagering. Then, I had a really big day thanks to Santa Anita and Harrison tracks.

I stayed around the $100 mark for about 3 weeks, and then I blew it after really fucking myself on the Royal Ascot. Could've made a lot of headway betting Defrocked to win, and instead only bet to place and all I ever did was $2 bets.

I still have an active account but I'm tapped out. I didn't want to play around anymore, and I actually missed out on Camps' amazing pick of Bradester on Saturday. Had I gone in on that, I'd have gotten all my money back and still been in good shape.

I don't know if I'll put more money in it. I see they're running another promo for Santa Anita, which I had the best success with for whatever reason, and it's tempting. But I feel like this little mistress is an absolute whore sometimes and I got tired of being bitch slapped.

Then again, all it takes is one right pick on a UK or SAF race, and seriously...you can get like ridiculous payouts.

The most incredible one I saw, I think it was UK...there was a horse called Dreamforest, and Facebook. If you bet an Exacta on them, you got a payout of $484, and that was on $2. A trifecta worked out to be something like $1,100. Unreal.

I won't blame WWN for my woes, though. Maybe I should've asked for advice. Then again...looking at some picks in these threads...ah...I'm glad I didn't.

The MLWT Thrill Kill Kult was one of my favorite bands in high school. Loved Wax Trax!

glad you got that reference.

Welcome aboard, W-Z! It's a great game!

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

I have done the Australian racing on MANY a boring night.

_________________
"All crowds boycotting football games shouldn't care who sings or takes a knee because they aren't watching." - Nas

Sex on wheels.

_________________

when i needed a new name for dialup BBSes (after the incredibly original "raiden" and "the hell knight") i went to a song whose name happened to be the name of the first dialup BBS i ever called and found inspiration in the hook/chorus/whatever ("i'm the......")

and then of course regarding wax trax and all, welp, one of the good things about that skinny puppy / frontline assembly show i did up in ether dec 2013 or dec 2014 (aside from $35!!! SP tour shirts, $75-80ish hoodies, and even a $200-250+ SP flag that the merch guys were claiming was like "1 of maybe 5 ever made!!) was getting this indelible little piece of nostalgia that offsets another classic sticker i got around 2013 (foreshadowing my future and the fact i'm "ready" for it...)



btw to cap off the TKK stuff, after a terrible bit of latent parenting caused my parents to step up and deprive a 15 year old me of gong to the november 1995 TKK "hit and run holiday tour" at the vic DESPITE having rides up and back from the suburbs and older friends from HS there (i couldnt find ANYONE willing to go with me on a free extra ticket i had cuz my normal music/concert friend was on vacation in DC) -- yeah i finally got around to seeing TKK live circa 2008-2009, and seeing a ~50something groovie mann decked out in skintight leather with a "quizzical" look on his bespectacled-with-sunglasses face had me pondering like "man, am i turning into my dad in terms of digging the same old music in an endless spiral until my death?" --- i reckon also seeing del the funkee homosapiwn for like the ~5th time around 2010 when all the (white) kids in the crowd were singing/rapping long word for word with the lyrics of "catch a bad one" was kind of essentially my pre-midlife crisis in terms of "wow i think i might no longer be 'cool' as much as i'm just 'holding on to nostalgia' ---- C'EST LA VIE, NO?!?!


ANYWAYS, ON TOPIC..... i got nothing. tho hey i wont crack any bvb jokes like when there was a horse named dortmund a year or two ago... promise!

_________________

i knew you'd like it.

oh i forgot the hong kong races. those also appear in the wee hours. and boy are those horse names great. i think almost every one of them is like "happy time fun show".

two things bug me in horse-naming: therunonhorsenames, and hanover. it sounds like you're naming your horse "horse". it's so unimaginative.

favorite names i've come across so far: Triforce, My Smokin' Hot Wife, File For Divorce, Blutarski, Edward Teach, and Dragon Breath.

The run-on names are usually because the Jockey Club allows a maximum of 18 characters including spaces.

Hanover is a farm name. It's from harness racing. Thoroughbred racing's Jockey Club has enough sense not to allow farm names. I can't really blame the farm for doing it. It's great advertising when a horse with the Hanover name is winning a big stakes race.

I've bought a lot of horses from Hanover. This was the best one:



We had a good relationship with Hanover and we usually didn't change their names. You can only change a name before the horse races the first time. We had this partner named Shirley Levin, a super rich old broad from Barrington who always wanted to change the horses' names. We bought a colt named Unknown Identity from a farm in Big Rock, Illinois and she kept complaining that it was a "negative" name. She wanted to change it to something that had the name of her Sarah Coventry jewlery business in it, Parklane. I wasn't going for that. We let her name the horse Diamond Man and he turned out to be pretty good.

Early in my racing career I had a couple real rats that my partner and I gave cool names- Royale With Cheese and Bottle Of Fur. They were both no account.

These are two of my favorite names of horses I owned:

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

great names

i figured the runon thing was due to limitations. it looks so jumbled. but sometimes there's a clever name in there, if you take the time to read it. it's just an eyesore when looking at a race card.

i also read up on hanover and that makes sense too, it's just, again, kind of a blah thing. but a few horses i bet on with that name won.

another thing about TVG...well, two things: if their website is addictive, their app is even moreso. it's ridiculous. also, it's invitingly colorful and that distracts you from realizing how much money you are losing. like, "aw, you lost $12 on an exacta box? well...look, colors!"

and equibase numbers are deceiving, and so are the TVG picks.

oh and what's with races with 24 fucking horses...

I've always been fascinated by the breeding end of the business. You can trace every horse in the U.S. back to a stallion named Messenger that was imported from England in the 1780s. All the harness horses or standardbreds come through Hambletonian 10. If you go back further, I believe every racehorse can be traced back to one of three horses, The Byerly Turk, The Godolphin Barb, or The Darley Arabian.

Roaring Good Time is a daughter of Tigger Hanover (she has a full brother named Oh Bother) from the family of the foundation mare K. Nora through that one's daughter, the brilliant broodmare, Tiger's Milk.

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

interesting. godolphin sounds familiar. i think they had a good day at the royal ascot last week.

[quote="W_Z"]interesting. godolphin sounds familiar. i think they had a good day at the royal ascot last week./quote]

_________________
You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

so i have a "my stable" set up and one of the horses in there is racing today in Penn National, R4. i don't know if i should make a play. she's got a pretty good track record but her history is running with 6-8 horses total. today there are 11 and she's posted 10th. she's won at post 6 on 6 horses, and at 1 or 2 with the same amount. so i'm not sure if that works in her favor or not.

i wonder about these situations, how much all of those factors can affect things. because i'm just starting in this, really. any thoughts would be welcomed.

_________________
I'm going to bounce from the spot for awhile but I will be back at some point to argue with you about this hoops stuff again. Playoffs have been great this season. See ya up the road.

I'm out.

she finished 2nd. i saved myself with a show bet. i was impressed, even with a scratch there were still 9 horses total i think.

the thing that annoys me is the constant odd changes these horses get. she was 12-1 5 minutes before the race and by race time she was 9/2. in the words of hawk, that is total bee ess.

That's because the pools at Penn National are so shallow, especially on a weekday afternoon. If you're betting a place with big handle like Saratoga or Santa Anita, the odds won't jump around like that.

Here is a handy chart rating the tracks based on takeout which is the price we pay to wager. I don't believe it is up to date though, because Canterbury has drastically reduced its takeout and is currently one of the best tracks to play based on value for the better.

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

Thanks for the tips, JORR. Where is the chart?

Oh and I have grown fond of watching the harness races. I get a kick out of watching the legs. A lot of times I won't even bet, just watch. Fun stuff.

Oh, sorry about that.

Here it is:

http://www.horseplayersassociation.org/ ... table.html

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

cool, thanks JORR! definitely good to use as a reference.