Harness Overlays: Beating the Favorite

Bill Heller

I wanted to like this book. I really did. I own two other Heller books (Overlay, Overlay and Turf Overlays), and they're both at least worthwhile, if not the rock-solid sourcebooks one gets from Brohamer or Quirin. But back ten or so years ago, I read Tom Ainslie's book on harness racing. Ainslie is the undisputed king of Thoroughbred writers, the man who brought Thoroughbred handicapping into the modern age; he is the foundation sire of every handicapper since 1968, in one way or another, directly or indirectly. And, simply put, his harness book was crap. Why I expected Bill Heller to do any better, I'm not sure.

Much of the problem with Harness Overlays lies in its vagueness. There are long stretches of information that are interesting (in at least one chapter, "interesting" is kind of a stretch), but their usefulness at the time of publication, much less eleven years later, is questionable at best. This is okay, relatively, when you've got a six-hundred-page tome and you want to throw in some interesting, not really all that relevant but it'll give the reader a break material. When your book is a quarter that length, you're going to end up with a reader who feels cheated. (By the way, the six hundred page tome I was thinking of when I wrote that is Olmsted's Compleat Handicapper. $65 when I bought it eight years ago, paid for itself on my first bet using one of its principles, and has been worth many times that much over the years. A must-have for any handicapper.)

What the vagueness masks is... very little, really. I take copious notes on handicapping books, usually so I can translate them into code for quick system testing. A slim book with much common-knowledge information or an older book that's had much repetition since and thus has become common knowledge, like Ainslie's Complete Guide to Thoroughbred Racing, will give me about four pages of notes; a book with some math in it and a few ideas I haven't seen before, e.g. Carroll's Handicapping Speed, will give me six or seven; a book heavy in advanced math concepts will give me twenty to thirty (e.g. Brohamer's Modern Pace Handicapping, still the best handicapping book I've ever read). How many pages did I get out of Harness Overlays? Less than one. As a handicapping manual, I can't recommend it in the least.

Where I can give it decent marks is in that vagueness I mentioned above. Two chapters are jockeys' responses to questionnaires about their driving strategies, and the right respondents (four from New York, four from Chicago) are all award-winning drivers. It's great to get into the minds of the best guys out on the track, and those two chapters alone are worth the price of admission. If you're looking for good, solid handicapping material on the trotters and pacers, stick to a guy who specializes in them (Jerry Connors, who wrote the Handicapping Beyond the Basics books, is probably your best bet; there's a dearth of good harness handicapping info out there).