Montoro stayed true to data

When Dennis Montoro won the Del Mar Challenge last weekend, he became the latest so-called “computer player” to make a name for himself in the contest world. Montoro, who uses a computer algorithm to do his handicapping and guide his betting decisions, won more than $135,000.

Montoro uses models in his day job as well. He’s the director of planning for a wholesale men’s apparel company. But his attraction to numbers extends way past his work life.

“I’ve always been a quantitative person,” said the 32-yearold New York resident. “Math and stats and learning to apply them have always been a hobby. About eight years ago I realized they could be applied to anything that’s probability based – sports betting, poker, horse racing.”

Montoro didn’t exactly hit the ground running with his computer model. “I was a big loser at first,” he admitted, “but I grew up and learned more, and I read everything I could find on the subject including different scholarly journals.”

Like so many players using computer models to play the horses, Bill Benter is an important name to Montoro. He first discovered his name through a simple Google search. “I’m a huge fan and I’ve tried to emulate what he’s done based on the limited amount of info he’s made public.”

Another name he cited was the comparatively obscure Noah Silverman. “He was big in the Hong Kong circuit applying Benter’s philosophy,” he said.

There’s an old saying among computer programmers: garbage in, garbage out. That’s why it’s so important to be creative and control the information that your model is processing. “Over time I’ve played around with the inputs into the models to make it my own and I’ve been successful,” Montoro said.

His model creates a power rating for every runner in each race – this number is based entirely on empirical data – and then he combines that with other information, including real-time pool data, to create a set of probabilities for every horse. This is how he handicaps. Where an average player might look at a race for 30 minutes or even longer if he or she wanted to create a 100 percent odds line, Montoro and other computer players can get the same information with a few key strokes. At that point, these numbers get compared to the final betting market so he can identify instances of EV, a statistics term meaning expected value.

Montoro has been active in tournaments for the past 2 1/2 years. Until this past weekend he’d never played in a live event; he’d only played in online contests where all he needed to do was identify one horse to bet in each race. Montoro and his friend Adam Thoutt both won their $8,000 buy-ins for Del Mar’s contest in online events.

Playing in a live-bankroll contest was a completely different animal for Montoro. “Livebankroll contests require a lot more skill as a bettor than just as a horse picker or handicapper,” he said.

“The model isn’t straightforward about giving you the winner of a race,” he continued. “In contests, I start with the model and then look to apply game theory. You’ll only be successful if you figure out how to use it correctly within the tournament, early on, through the middle, and to the end. It’s on the user to figure out how to apply it.”

Understandably, there were some growing pains on the contest’s first day. “I had three winners, but you really want to get paid off for your winners,” he said. “It felt like a missed opportunity not to make more of it. I went back and reviewed what I should have done and tried to incorporate the lessons I learned.”

The main lesson was that he was too conservative. “I needed to take all the human emotion out of it,” he said, before echoing one of the primary truths of live-bank play. “The money has to be treated like poker chips.”

Heading to day two, he committed to a plan. “I was going to go home broke or hit one of the last few races to give myself some sort of ending bankroll that had a chance to win.”

He scouted out the later races looking for a place to step things up and make a big bet. Going into the second to last race he had about $11,000 and he bet $3,500 to win on a 7-2 shot that ran second. But he went to the last race undaunted.

“I had $7,500 and I said to myself, this is the situation I prepared for. Don’t worry about the money, make the play.”

He took the horse that came out best on his power ratings and pushed all-in. “My bet knocked the price into 4-1 but then before they went off I saw he went back to 5-1,” he said. “That made me think that no one else in the contest was betting the horse to win.”

When Raven Creek hit the line first, Montoro’s bankroll swelled to $42,000 and his name was at the top of the leaderboard. It might have been his first live-bank contest, but this was anything but beginner’s luck.