One of the hardest handicapping lessons is the one that deals with percentages and their effect on making money at the dog track. It’s not just that math is involved. It’s that most people don’t know how to use percentage statistics when they’re handicapping the races.

For instance, if a dog has had 100 races and has won 50, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that the dog has a 50% win percentage. Nor is it difficult to understand that the dog wins 1 out of 2 races that it runs. (By the way, I’d like to see more dogs with this kind of percentage, wouldn’t you?)

So if this dog was running and had come in second in its last race, you’d be a fool not to bet it, right? Wrong. Take out that penny and I’ll show you why.

Throw the penny up and catch it on your forearm – in other words, flip it – 100 times. Write down how many times the penny comes up heads and how many times it comes up tails.

If it was perfectly balanced and you flipped it the same way every time, the penny would come up heads half the time and tails half the time.

It doesn’t, because it isn’t perfectly balanced and you don’t throw it the same way every time. But it should be close to half heads and half tails. Now, look at where you wrote that down.

Does it look like this: heads, tails, heads, tails… alternating fifty times until you have a list of 100 penny tosses? Probably not. It’s more likely that it’s something like this: heads, heads, tails, tails, heads, tails, heads, tails, tails, tails… etc.

In other words, while the overALL percentage of times the penny came up heads is around 50%, it wasn’t heads every other time or tails every other time. It was much more random, although it all added up to roughly 50% for heads and 50% for tails.

It’s the same with greyhounds. They can have a percentage that shows that they win half the time, but they could have lost twenty races in a row and then won twenty, lost five, won five and so on. Just because a dog has won half its races, doesn’t mean that it’s more likely to win the next race after it loses a race.

It may go on to lose four more races before it wins again. Or it might lose this race and then win the next six. There’s just no way to predict whether a dog is more likely to win or lose by using statistics. Statistics can only tell us what a dog has done in the past.

Unfortunately, we can’t bet on past races. (Don’t you wish we could?) So when you look at percentages, just use them as a guide, not a sure thing. It’s more important that a dog has recently been running in the money, not that he was a few weeks ago, even if that’s when he won the races that give him a good percentage.

Australia Srilanka Cricket Series 1st ODI

It was a Srilankan Hopes day and they are on High as they have beaten the Australia T20 match and they are take 3 time World cup winners.

Match started at Sydney and Australia have won the toss and elected to bat first.

Following is the team Decided by both the teams

Teams:

Cricket Australia (Playing XI): Brad Haddin(w), Shane Watson, Michael Clarke(c), Michael Hussey, Cameron White, Shaun Marsh, Steven Smith, John Hastings, Mitchell Johnson, Peter Siddle, Xavier Doherty

Cricket Sri Lanka (Playing XI): Upul Tharanga, Tillakaratne Dilshan, Kumar Sangakkara(w/c), Mahela Jayawardene, Chamara Silva, Angelo Mathews, Thissara Perera, Suraj Randiv, Nuwan Kulasekara, Muttiah Muralitharan, Lasith Malinga

Catch the Cricket Live score at www.cricandcric.com

In this match, Xavier Makes ODI debut, and Ricky ponting was not able to take place as his Grand mother passed away.

Malinga opened the srilankan Attack and Watson and Haddin both openers are ready to face the Srilankan bullets

In the Match Parera had a beautiful chance to take Autralian when he claimed White and Haddin, but Hussey did not give him a chance to grab the hat trick

In this match, we can definitely notice that Sangakara was shuffling his bowling attack and getting the wickets on time and regularly

We can definitely notice that there was a superb match between the Srilanka and Australia, the win was swinging between Australia and Srilanka, I was a thinking srilanka might win and some times Australia might win the match but the  Sri Lankan innings was a complete roller coaster ride.

With Sanga going strong it looked like SL will put this off easily but the Aussies bounced back reducing SL from 73/2 to 86/6. The two M’s - Mathews and Malinga – took the game away from the Aussies with some powerful and fearless hitting. They put on a 132 run partnership for the 9th wicket which is the highest in the history of ODIs. The look on the face of the Aussies says the whole story, they were at touching distance from a massive win but a miracle of sorts by the Sri Lankan lower order denied it

Post Match Presentation Summary

Presentation:

Sangakkara: There is nothing that I can say, but these two batsmen were unbelievable. We knew that Angelo is the greatest asset that we have in our side, he can bat, bowl and field well as well. We will enjoy this win but a lot of hard work lies ahead of us before we go to Sydney.

Angelo Mathews: Credit to Malinga, he was batting beautifully. Putting up such a performance against the Aussies is pleasing.

Angelo Mathews is the Man of the Match for his match winning knock of 77 runs.

Clarke: Tough day at the office this, as you said they were 8/107 and I didn’t know how we managed to lose this. Full credit to SL, Mathews and Malinga were unstoppable. All the boys are disappointed, it hurts when you can’t win close games, we can look at the positives from this game. It shows us that a team can win from any position.