Somewhere along the way, corrupt trainers took the mantle away from lovable wiseguy handicappers as the face of the industry. This changing of the guard certainly hasn’t done the sport any favors. I was at a dinner party when I overheard a young blonde tell one of her girlfriends that Big Brown almost ran in the Belmont but didn’t because he had laminitis. Of course, you know that he had tendinitis, but you get my point. Somewhere out there is a young blonde woman who actually thought that Big Brown almost contested the Belmont Stakes despite a deadly illness. It goes without saying that if you did a word association game with someone off the street and said horse racing, the first image that would pop into their heads is someone who looked like Ron Jeremy sending out horses with laminitis.

So, needless to say I was skeptical when I heard that the Esquire network was doing a show on the modern handicapper, but apparently there are times when you can expect the unexpected.

Horseplayers takes a look at the world of thoroughbred racing from the world of professional handicappers, but references to complex handicapping algorithms are few and far between. The goal of horseplayers is to be contrarian and take the position that despite what mainstream media tells you, watching horses go around an oval is a hell of a lot of fun. The show does this by introducing us to wise guys like John Conte from Aqueduct. He’s the type of guy who chats up the hottest waitress at the bar, but ends it early so he can get up the next morning to watch workouts. Another character that I liked was two Breeders’ Cup Handicapping Championship runner-up, Christian Hellmers. He kept picking Goldenscents all year because he hung out with the horse and supposedly got a good vibe from him. Christian is the prototypical oddball West Coast handicapper that I can’t get enough of. He’s the guy that won’t bet a filly if she’s running against males and looks passive in the post parade. In other words, Christian is not a pure statistical handicapper- he’s too much of a badass for something like that.

John and Christian are why Horseplayers gets it right, and HBO’S Luck got it wrong. This sport may be down on its luck and experience unbelievable corruption at times, but it still attracts the coolest people in the country. I don’t have to tell you how many parts of the brain a legitimate handicapping process uses. If you are reading this, you are probably the type of person who knows that properly handicapping a horse race is like doing bench presses with your mind- it’s not for the faint of heart. The interesting thing is that the only people who want to do bench presses via telepathy are people who are quirky fun and have a story to tell. Horseplayers chooses to focus on these people and lets the corrupt trainer with the 35% win percentage fade to the background, even if it is just for one hour each week.