Thursday Thoughts with Jason Beem for March 20, 2025

A good Thursday morning to you all! Hope spring is springing wherever you might be! I wanted to write today about bias in handicapping, but not the bias you might be thinking of. I feel like in racing we talk all the time about "track bias" and it’s a big handicapping angle that a lot of people pay close attention to. But as someone who is always curious about the psychological part of the game for horseplayers, I want to talk about biases we might have as we look at a race. 

There are a lot of definitions of bias, but let’s go with this one as a working definition as I feel it works best for today’s topic.  

Bias: prejudice in favor of or against one thing, person, or group compared with another, usually in a way considered to be unfair. 

I feel like most people get the concept, but I don’t think it’s something we pay much attention to. That goes for a lot of areas of our lives, but handicapping or betting as well. We play the tracks we like, we avoid the ones we don’t, we bet on connections we trust, we avoid the ones we don’t, and so on and so forth. 

The reason this topic came to my head today was I was looking at the Louisiana Derby (G2) for today’s podcast. The first horse I saw was John Hancock and my initial thought was to be against him in this spot. I normally have a huge rooting bias for horses that I get to call, whether it’s at Tampa or Colonial. I think I’ve become so aware of that bias that I’ve now started to go the other direction and get immediately dismissive of them, even though I’m totally rooting for them.  

So I wanted to dig a little deeper. Why was my instinct to go against John Hancock so immediate and strong? And is it bias or more an actual handicapping opinion? The handicapping opinion would be that he ran a tough race last time getting pushed much of the way. He did it at 1 1/16 miles and it wasn’t a particularly fast time. Now there’s obviously a different way to view it, acknowledging that John Hancock battled a horse who came back to win a Grade 3 next out (Owen Almighty) and shook him off. John Hancock was making only his second career start and first at two turns; he's a candidate to keep improving. 

The more I thought about it, the more I made a case for John Hancock as a contender. But then I saw the morning line (John Hancock favored) and if he really is going to be the favorite, I think another bias of mine kicked in, because I don’t ever want to support favorites that I think have several question marks. John Hancock might be the second coming of Pegasus, but he’s also only ran twice, must stretch out to 1 3/16 miles, has never run outside of Tampa Bay Downs, and so on.  

Bias is something I try to be aware of in my daily life, and it’s amazing how unconscious it can be. We do things without realizing we might have a prejudice against something or someone for no real reason other than a bias we have. I think it’s important to judge and be aware of that, but I think that goes for handicapping as well. There’s certain jockeys or trainers that I sometimes see in a race and immediately dismiss. Knowing they may win at an 8 or 10 percent rates, I just completely dismiss them 100% of the time. For no other reason that I think they generally stink. But I’m ignoring the fact that they do win sometimes and are capable of winning at a better rate than it may appear. 

Anyways, just pondering a little bit on this topic, after all this column is called Thursday Thoughts. Good luck this weekend everyone!