Supersoul,

I think you will find that Mr.Magic's point about the coin toss was that in theory the chance of a particular jockey winning/placing on a particular horse is a particular percentage (say 33%) and this is not related to how many rides he(she) has had since their last win/place. Just because a jockey has not won for 20 races does not mean they suddenly have a much better chance of winning just to maintain their win/loss ratio.

With regard to your point on the different divs on the different bet sizes - yes that does make a difference when you are looking at a few days worth of winners - but in the LONG RUN (say thousands of bets) it makes no difference unless there is a higher average dividend on those bets. You may have seen I posted an analysis of Beadmans winners for last 4 months in another thread which indicated that he did have higher divs & higher strike rate on the $6 & $18 bets which makes EI's system work better than even stakes FOR THIS RIDER. I can't explain why this is (it may just be a statistical anomoly which will dissappear over a longer period of time). What it probably does show is that you have to be careful with any statistical analysis of horse racing - sometimes your gut feel may be more reliable!

Finally I don't believe your criticism of my analysis of the 56% strike rate is valid - I simply started with 100 $1 bets as it made it easier for people to follow the maths. It doesn't matter whether the example has 100 bets, 171 bets or 3276 - the percentages all work out. As for your loss analysis can I just ask how you get 50 2-unit losses when we have stated there are only 44 2-unit bets? The total number of losses in my example is 74.5 which is roughly 44%.

In summary I think you will find my analysis is technically correct but I agree that it does not mean you have to throw away EI's system. Personally I think his jockey selection has merit but if I were to use it I would change the staking plan to something like 0,3,5,7,6,6 (for BEADMAN - you would need to work out the best one for each jockey) - this gives you the higher bets on the better paying rides, skips the first ride from a win which statistically loses money, and allows you to go up to 6 rides instead of 4 without increasing your maximum loss.