Rhodes professor is one of world’s best horse racing bettors
Marshall Gramm is a Rhodes College economics professor who thinks in data and numbers and statistics, so he couldn’t initially remember the horse’s name.
He remembered the horse’s number, and what race it was running at the Fair Grounds in New Orleans. He remembered the trainer’s name, the horse’s breeding and how that trainer’s horses tend to get underbet. He remembered the condition of the track, and why he felt that set up the race perfectly for this particular horse.
He remembered that the odds were 6-1, even though he predicted they would be 3-1. He remembered that “everything jumped off the page,” Gramm said.
But more importantly, he remembered the clock was ticking inside a ballroom at the Treasure Island Casino in Las Vegas last Sunday.
A spot at the final table of the National Horseplayers Championship — think the World Series of Poker but for betting on horses — hung in the balance.
So in that moment, Gramm decided to bet on a horse 1,700 miles away named Homefieldadvantage.
And then that horse won the race, cementing Gramm as one of the world’s 10 best horse racing handicappers this year.
Yes, you read that right: A Rhodes College economics professor in Memphis is one of the best in the world at betting on horses.
“I was excited and I was relieved,” Gramm said. “This is not the type of tournament you do well in.”
If this all seems a bit obscure, well it is.
After all, there isn’t a horse racing track in Memphis.
Yes, Rhodes has a racetrack wagering class
Over the past century, the sport has gone from one of our national past times to something most Americans only pay attention to around the Triple Crown. And if horse racing is a niche sport, horseplayers are the niche supporters who obsess over it.
Gramm, 45, is most certainly one of those, but he isn’t one of those grizzledlooking, cigarette-smoking men you might find at Southland Park in the middle of the week.
He grew up in Washington, D.C., poring over the horse racing odds that appeared in The Washington Post sports section. Then he went to Rice University in Houston, got his PH.D. from Texas A&M, got hired by Rhodes College 19 years ago and never left Memphis.
After initially researching “bank regulation boring stuff,” he decided to turn his habit into his job. He began to use horse racing data to look at betting markets as a proxy for financial markets and pricing.
He’s also a co-founder and part-owner of Ten Strike Racing, a 10-year-old syndicate named after the 1884 winner of the Tennessee Stakes held in Memphis.
He owns about 40 horses, and they’re based everywhere from Hot Springs, Ark., to Philadelphia to New York and New Orleans. Some of them have Memphis-inspired names like Take That For Data and Grit and Grind.
This semester, in addition to teaching intermediate macroeconomics at Rhodes, Gramm is also teaching a twocredit course called “the economics of racetrack wagering markets.” He’s probably got the only office on campus featuring a whiteboard with line graphs on one wall and a framed jockey silk on another.
It’s fascinating and confusing and unusual listening to him talk about how all this happened.
How he became an academic steeped in almost every facet of horse racing. How the tenets of economics can give you clues into the pacing of a race or the integrity of a track. How evaluating and betting on horses can offer his students lessons in behavioral economics and model building.
“A lot of things they’ll do in their lives involve decision-making, involve decision-making with small sample sizes, involve a lot of the things that I do as a horseplayer,” Gramm explained. “The betting markets are like financial markets in the way they work. You have people who come together and establish prices, whether they know a lot about the horses or very little.”
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Making the National Horseplayers Championship
Which brings us back to last weekend in Las Vegas.
Gramm qualified by placing fifth out of 390 horseplayers at the Breeders Cup Betting Challenge, in addition to top-10 finishes at events held at Belmont Park in New York and Keeneland Race Course in Lexington, Ky. At the Breeders Cup, he turned a $7,500 bank roll into $52,000 and was down to his last $1,000 at one point.
This was Gramm’s fifth appearance at the NHC, and he’d never come close to doing this well before. His expectations were so low he bought a Sunday plane ticket home to Memphis, figuring he wouldn’t make it to the final day of the competition.
Last year. he finished 23rd from the bottom.
“I was the cold guy at the hot table,” Gramm said. “This year, everyone at my table was cold and I was hot.”
This year, he finished in ninth place and won more than $60,000. But the methods that got Gramm “hot” actually run counter to what you’d expect from a college professor.
Some horseplayers exclusively rely on computer models and algorithms to place their bets. Others simply rely on those race programs you see at every track around the country.
Gramm does some of both, but considers himself more of a traditionalist who wants to know a horse’s background and tends to rely on hunches more than mathematical formulas.
The NHC operates with mythical money and the scores are based on how much money you make off a $2 winplace bet. Each day, a horseplayer is required to bet on 18 races at eight tracks around the country.
The event began with 670 people, got whittled down to 67 by Sunday morning and ended with the final 10 all at one table.
To get there, not only did Gramm have to find winners, he also had to find winners with the best odds. Horses like Homefieldadvantage.
“You can study all day and fall in love with a horse, but if it’s not the right price, it might not be worth playing,” Gramm said. “If it’s not the right odds, you can’t play it.”
It’s why an economics professor just might be the ideal occupation for a quirky endeavor like this one.
You can reach Commercial Appeal columnist Mark Giannotto via email at mgiannotto@gannett.com and follow him on Twitter: @mgiannotto