Punting Profiles: Andrew Beyer

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To American horseplayers, Andrew Beyer is simply the man. He revolutionised horse betting in the United States to such an extent that he will forever be intrinsically linked to the game he loves. From a base of intellectualism and curiosity, Andrew Beyer fell in love with horse racing. Not the horses nor the trainers, not the romance or the atmosphere, not the racecallers or the whip-wielding hoops. No, Beyer was intrigued by the infinite string of numbers and theories that the racing game held and fell in love with the challenge of beating it. When he developed a way to beat the game through the development of a system to measure horses against each other, rather than hold the secret for his own purposes, he shared it with the public. And at the expense of his own wagering gains, Beyer told the tale and produced what was essentially the Bible for horse bettors in the U.S. American horse racing has had no more important person in its ranks.

As a young child reared in Middle America, Beyer was obsessed with puzzles. He grew up going through phases of poker and chess and bridge, the attraction being the mathematical puzzle aspects associated to them all. But it was horse racing that he found most challenging and horse racing that he was most confident he could beat. From the day as a wide-eyed twelve year old that he was taken to the long gone Randall Park track outside of blue collar Cleveland, Beyer was fixated on the sport.

As a teenager, Beyer placed the small wagers of a kid with a sympathetic bookie none-too-concerned about illegal under-aged wagering. Beyer tried hard to find an angle and tested plenty of theories and popular wagering systems but none proved successful over any significant period of time. What Beyer realised he needed wasn’t an angle but a measurement, a way to correctly assess the chances of each horse and have a basis to compare each steed to its opponent.

Throughout his college years when he was supposedly grafting away at a degree in English Literature, Beyer spent his days at the Suffolk Downs racecourse- located in the Ivy League heartland of Boston- and his nights at the card table funding his racing habit. In the end, English Literature never stood a chance. Beyer never showed up to his final exam, a test on 14th century wordsmith and father of English literature Chaucer. It was Belmont Stakes day and Beyer wasn’t missing it for the world.

With class the prevailing factor of the day in betting markets and theories determining the best winning hopes, Beyer soon became perplexed by the ability of horses rising in grade and winning. He began to question the soundness of the class is key notion that dominated the times of his novice racing days. The seemingly unswayable belief among punters that slower horses competing in higher level races were “better” than horses winning lower grade races and rising in class didn’t sit right with Beyer. So he sought out an answer. He wanted to prove, or disprove as it turned out, that class was the best indicator to a horses winning chances.

As he paid for his wagering losses by writing racing columns for sports pages, Beyer went about finding a real way to measure racehorses. He reasoned that the fundamental reason one horse defeated another was because it was faster than his opponent, deducing that speed provided the fundamental truth to racing form. In the late 1950’s a number of horse handicappers had toyed with speed ratings and models but none could establish a system that could reliably compare times across distances and tracks. Beyer did just that. Through tediously extracting data from mountains of old Daily Racing Form’s, Beyer established that speed was a better cue than class and armed with a way to measure the speed of horses across different distances and courses, Beyer was now a formidable horse player.

Through developing par times by factoring in factors such as track conditions and other track variants, Beyer could soon measure horses coming from different tracks and from different distances against each other by assigning each horse a speed figure. No longer would he have to use an educated guess to determine whether one horse’s 1:11 over six furlongs at Churchill Downs on a fast track was better or worse than another horses 1:23 at Belmont over seven furlongs. His speed figures told him that.

Beyer, armed with this knowledge, made plenty at the track from then on, finding plenty of winners rising in grade at hefty odds. He had found the source of value. Rather than keep this secret to himself, Beyer went about becoming the Yardley of horse racing (Herbert Yardley had published the definitive poker education book of the era “Education of a Poker Player”) by publishing his complex system and findings. The result was the 1975 “Picking Winners: A Horseplayer’s Guide”, the definitive and landmark publication in American horse racing and a book that against expectations became the best selling horse racing book of all time.

The book and the system unashamedly and effectively changed the psyche of American horse handicappers. Class was no longer king. Speed was.

By 1987, Beyer was selling his figures to the public. In the days before computers, the task of record-keeping was intense and laborious and required immense discipline. But Beyer stuck with it and was not only reaping the rewards of successful wagering and payment for his system numbers but significant public acclaim. Beyer had risen to the echelons of America’s top racehorse handicappers.

In 1992, the Daily Racing Form began publishing the Beyer Speed Figures in their form, a response to their inherent usefulness and the public demand for them. The number one racing form in the nation had entrenched Andy Beyer into not only the national lexicon of the game he loved but into history as a true revolutionary of the wagering world.

These figures are not the be all and end all, however, and Beyer is the first to preach that. Other visual (and often immeasurable) factors such as bad rides, poor starts and one’s preference for certain conditions need also be considered. A horse with a Beyer Speed Figure of 90 will not necessarily defeat a horse with a rating of 80 because the horse with a speed rating of 80 may have excuses for such an effort. Beyer also speaks of the benefits of a good temperament and the value of detachment. It does not matter how good the information you have is if you let winning and losing affect you and the way you punt. All punters go through the highs and lows but it is successful bettors who can keep the emotions in check.

Andrew Beyer, today, is revered in the American racing game as a handicapper who developed a system and a way of thinking that revolutionised horse wagering. He and his thinking have stood the test of time in one of the most demanding games there is. He writes for The Washington Post which he has done since 1978 and is as influential in racing circles as any course owner or trainer or administrator. Beyer became the Yardley of racing. And he found an absolute ocean in the desert; a truism.