Two-horse Race Research Articles

Racing for America: The Horse Race of the Century and the Redemption of a Sport

Racing for America covers the events and the lives of the characters leading up to the “International Race,” a 1923 horse race held in New York that had the largest purse in horse racing history at the time: $100,000. The two-horse race, or “match race,” was between the 1923 American Kentucky Derby and Belmont Stakes winner Zev and 1923 British Derby winner (referred to throughout the book as the “Epsom Derby” or “English Derby” to lessen confusion with the Kentucky Derby) Papryus. Both were considered the top horses in their countries at the time. The title “Racing for America” comes from a quote from Zev's owner Harry Sinclair, emphasizing the importance of the nationality of the horse to American pride, while “Race of the Century” was the name given to the race by newspapers of the time (albeit it was early in the twentieth century). “The Redemption of a Sport” refers to declining interest in horse racing in the United States—it was considered a corrupt sport—and that this particular race brought some respectability and excitement back to horse racing in America.Racing for America is authored by James C. Nicholson, editor of the series Horses in History (a series of which this book is a part), and author of many other horse racing history books. The work starts out with a jam-packed introduction, explaining all the characters and the context of the tale to come throughout the rest of the book. Despite this being a nonfiction work, it reads like an epic novel, with death, drama, and lots of violence (examples include a jockey stabbing an owner, a trainer smashing another trainer's face with a cane, an angry lover throwing ducks at and shooting a politician, and a possibly suspicious stable fire that killed forty-two horses). The important jockeys, trainers, owners, and horses in the story are explained from their origins, their rise in the ranks of their professions, and the path for each to come together builds a story of intrigue and sometimes chance. The writing is entertaining and never dry.In Zev's story, the characters include Harry Sinclair (of Sinclair Oil), the owner of Zev embroiled in the Teapot Dome scandal, trainer Sam Hildreth, breeder/trainer John Madden, and jockey Earl Sande. Other important characters discussed in the American part of the story include United States president Warren G. Harding and the famous horse Man O’ War, a precursor to Zev in America in popularity. Papryus's story is shared in less detail, excitement, or scandal. The rumor that Papryus was a beer-drinking horse caused a commotion during US Prohibition, and he was sent overseas to the race in deluxe accommodations on a ship, and some detail is shared on his jockey Steve Donoghue and owner Ben Irish. But the British side of the story Nicholson provides is much shorter than the attention given to the US side. All this background leads to the International Race, which led to large-purse intercontinental horse races such as the Breeders’ Cup that are held today. The work gives most of the last third of the book to the few weeks before the race when both horses were in the United States, the race itself, and the aftermath of the race in both countries for the sport and the two horses and their surrounding characters.This work is accessible to those not familiar with horse racing history or United States history of the 1910s and 1920s: enough context is given of the United States politics of the time, particularly how politics affected the mood of the American people and anti-gambling and anti–horse racing laws of the time. To follow the book and the descriptions of races, it does help to know a little about horse racing—the explanations of furlongs and mounts and detailed race descriptions assume some knowledge, but lesser-known horse terms like “windsucking,” “cribbing,” and a horse's “frog” are helpfully explained. Many of the issues of concern today are repeating themselves from the era of this book: concern about national pride, the idea that a racetrack is filled with degenerate characters and corruption, and drugs and overtraining in the health of racehorses.The sources to support the story are strong: pages 187 to 218 are full of detailed footnotes, heavy on quotes from many different US newspapers and magazines of the time. The footnotes are followed by a multi-page bibliography and index. There are some pictures throughout the work of the important characters, although the descriptions and actions of the characters in the text are picturesque enough to not necessarily need the pictures.

Kyd, Shakespeare, and Arden of Faversham: Rerunning a Two-Horse Race

In a general essay published in the Times Literary Supplement in 2008, Brian Vickers combined close study of trigrams (sequences of three or more words) highlighted by anti-plagiarism software with...

A two-horse race

A two-horse race

Somatosensory effects of action inhibition: a study with the stop-signal paradigm

When a weak shock is delivered to the finger immediately before a voluntary movement, or during a delay interval where subjects are prepared to make the movement, shock detection rates worsen progressively as the movement approaches. Further, we previously showed that shock detection improves again if a NoGo signal produces inhibition of a prepared response. Here, we used a somatosensory version of the stop-signal paradigm to investigate inhibitory processing during the 'horserace' period when motor excitation and inhibition processes may be simultaneously active. When subjects made a rapid keypress response to a go-signal, shock detection deteriorated in a time-dependent manner, replicating sensory suppression. However, when go-signals were followed by adaptively delayed stop-signals so that subjects could not inhibit the prepared movement, and made errors of commission, we found a paradoxical brief increase in shock detection performance just after the stop-signal, as if in a NoGo trial. During this brief window, the somatosensory system showed a pattern consistent with motor inhibition, even though the motor system itself was too far advanced in movement execution for action to be inhibited. Most models of stop-signal processing propose a two-horse race between excitation and inhibition, with a winner-takes-all solution. We show that there may be distinct motor and somatosensory races. Moreover, inhibitory processes may lead in the somatosensory race, at least briefly, even when excitatory processes win the motor race.

Estimating Probability Distributions by Observing Betting Practices

A bookmaker takes bets on a two-horse race, attempting to minimize expected loss over all possible outcomes of the race. Profits are controlled by manipulation of customer' betting behavior; in order to do this, we need some information about the probability distribution which describes how the customers will bet. We examine what information initial customer' betting behavior provides about this probability distribution, and consider how to use this to estimate the probability distribution for remaining customers.

Election Campaigns and Television News Coverage: The Case of the 2001 Australian Election

This paper examines the patterns of television news coverage of the political parties, their leaders and the issues they raised during the 2001 Australian federal election campaign. By focusing on some issues, parties and leaders, television has long been argued to constrain voters' evaluations. We find that television news coverage in the 2001 Australian election campaign focused primarily on international issues, especially terrorism and asylum seekers, and on the two major parties—virtually to the exclusion of coverage of the minor parties and their leaders. Within the major party ‘two-horse race’, television gave substantially more coverage to the leaders than to the parties themselves, thereby sustaining what some have called a ‘presidential’-style political contest. John Howard emerged as the winner in the leaders' stakes, garnering more coverage than Labor's Kim Beazley.

The minimax bookie: the two-horse case

A bookmaker takes bets on a two-horse race, attempting to minimise expected loss over all possible outcomes of the race. Profits are controlled by manipulation of customers' betting behaviour, which is assumed to be determined uniquely by the price quoted for each horse. We consider different strategies for choosing these prices as bets accumulate, and examine the penalty incurred by the use of a strategy other than the optimal one, in the general case where the distribution of the customers' betting probabilities is unknown.

The Favorite-Longshot Bias in Sequential Parimutuel Betting with Non-Expected Utility Players

This paper analyzes a model of sequential parimutuel betting described as a two-horse race with a finite number of noise bettors and a finite number of strategic and symmetrically informed bettors. For generic objective probabilities that the favorite wins the race, a unique subgame perfect equilibrium is characterized. Additionally, two explanations for the favorite–longshot bias—according to which favorites win more often than the market's estimate of their winning chances imply—are offered. It is shown that this robust anomalous empirical regularity might be due to the presence of transaction costs and/or to strategic bettors' subjective attitude to probabilities.

The favourite-longshot bias in parimutuel betting: A clarification of the explanation that bettors like to bet longshots

One explanation of the favourite-longshot bias in parimutuel betting is that bettors derive utility from betting longshots. The purpose of this paper is to explore the conditions where such an explanation makes sense. We posit a simple two-horse race where there are two groups of bettors: one group always bets the longshot; the other bets on the basis of expected value. The model yields two results. In the absence of transactions costs (track take), there is no favourite-longshot bias. However, if the track take is positive, we would expect to observe the bias. The primary reason is that there is no short-selling mechanism in parimutuel betting markets. Hence, the explanation that bettors like to bet longshots also requires transactions costs and no short-selling.