The Racing Game

Marvin Scott, James David Barber

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780202308098
• eBook ISBN: 9781351302944
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Antropología

This study of a unique social world probes beneath the thrill and spectacle of horse racing into the lives of the "honest boys," the "gyps," the "manipulators," the "stoops," and the "Chalk eaters"--the constituents of race track society and the players of the racing game. With scientific precision and journalistic vigor, Scott describes the everyday activities--the objectives and strategies--of those whose lives are organized around track proceedings and who compete with chance and one another.

The players in the racing game range from track owners to stable boys, from law enforcers to lawbreakers, and from casual sportsmen to pathologically addicted gamblers. Considering the self-interests, the normative and operational codes, and the interactional relationships among the major types and subtypes of participants, the author defines the components of strategic movement within the framework of rules and resources to show how a player's relations to the "means of production" governs his behavior.

The fruitful application of sociological theory and method to an unusually interesting social context makes this particularly useful still for courses in social problems and the sociology of organizations and of leisure.

1 Introduction

The social world of horse racing evolves around problems of information.¹

Information may be defined simply as what a social actor knows about a situation. At the outset we may distinguish two kinds of information: the first involves an actor’s knowledge about the overall situation; the second is what he knows in common with other actors with whom he is in interaction.

These two kinds of information imply two kinds of ignorance.² What actors do not know about the workings of the total situation may be called organizational ignorance. The degree of organizational ignorance will vary for different actors depending on their positions in an organization. What actors do not know in common with other actors with whom they interact may be called interactional ignorance. For any two interactants—say, ego and alter—what ego is ignorant of is what he doesn’t know that alter knows, and vice versa. In the social world of horse racing, both kinds of ignorance are widely prevalent.

Besides the prevalence of organizational and interactional ignorance, much information that is available in horse racing possesses the property of ambiguity.³ To illustrate, consider a bit of information that race track gamblers believe to be very important in betting decisions: a horse has been entered in a race in which he will be running against animals that are markedly inferior to those with which he is generally matched. Now here is the rub and the nub of the matter: this bit of information is subject to two opposing interpretations. On one hand, a bettor may interpret this information to mean that a horse will win easily, because “everyone knows” that higher grade animals beat those of a lower grade. On the other hand, he may interpret this information to mean that the horse stands little chance of winning, because “everyone knows” that horsemen enter their animals in cheaper-than-usual races only when their chargers have become unsound.

Given the imperfectness and incompleteness of information— as implied by the prevalence of organizational and interactional ignorance—and given the ambiguity of available information—as illustrated above—how do horse racing participants go about their business? How can they make decisions with such poor information? How, indeed, is continuous action made possible? Clearly, we are confronted with another version of the Hobbesian question of how social order is possible.⁴

The curious fact about horse racing is that the participants do not act as if they were incompletely informed—not at all. Everything that is needed to pursue a consistent line of action is somehow known. How this is possible constitutes a major mystery that I wish to explore.

More specifically, the questions I wish to explore are: What interpretive devices are employed by the participants to obtain information? What tactics are routinely used by which they encode and decode pertinent messages? How do they determine the probable value of information? What are the patterns of information exchange? What resources .are available by which innovations develop to produce information?

Answers to these questions constitute a study in the organization of information. All this leads to my major theoretical assumption: the proper study of social organization is the study of the organization of information.

Having stated the type of data with which I will be concerned primarily, the next issue involves the theoretical model suitable for investigating the social organization of horse racing. Briefly, I have chosen to investigate the social organization of horse racing in terms of a game model in its simple social-psychological form.⁵

Beginning with the notion of the game as our model of an interaction system, we can think of race track happenings as game-generated events and the players as game-generated identities. Like all games, the racing game consists of rules that provide a framework of possible actions. Within the framework of these rules, the players can make certain moves. The players will employ different strategies depending upon their interest in the game (that is, the outcomes and rewards they are pursuing).

In this context, the players will face certain recurrent problems. To cope with these problems, standard orientations emerge. Persons who align their activities in terms of one of these standard orientations are identified and typed by other players. While the social actors tend to reify these types, the scientific observer must keep in mind that these types are simply conventional responses or orientations to a set of recurrent conditions.

What is generated in the world of horse racing is an information game. The information game is a game of strategy. That is, each player in deciding on a course of action takes into account that other players are engaged in the same sort of accounting. The players in this game are concerned with strategic information, which is not shared by the players in interaction; if this information were shared, the nature of the interaction would be radically different.⁶ Since information is a crucial feature of this game, much activity will be devoted toward discovering, concealing, and using information. Taken together, these patterns of interaction make up the information game, and the mode of interaction characteristic of the information game will be called strategic interaction.⁷

For the vast majority of players, the object of this game is to obtain “reliable information,” which will enable them to make winning bets. Each bet may be called a play, and the game-generated event where the play occurs is the race. To make a successful play is to “beat the race.” A continual pattern of beating the race gives rise to the much sought state of “beating the game” or “beating the system.”

The player’s effort to beat the race is constrained by a peculiar feature of horse racing: namely, the information game is played under a system of self-destroying information. That is, the very activity of using reliable information destroys its value. Even if the player knows for certain that only one horse in a race will be sent “all out” to win, he will be constrained from fully capitalizing on this information. The payoff for any horse depends on the amount of money bet on it. Thus the more money bet, the lower the odds and the smaller the payoff. Because no player can beat the game by beating one race, the player must continually renew his efforts at assessments for each play. As a result, patterns of strategic interaction remain persistent features of the game.

My task in the following chapters is to clarify and illustrate these rather abstract remarks. In the conclusion, I will review in detail what I have said about horse racing in terms of an information game.

Before concluding this introduction, I think a personal and methodological note is in order.

For my own part, I have found in horse racing a never-ending source of wonderment. Largely because of familial connections, I have had more than fifteen years of informational access to almost every aspect of horse racing. During this period I have “rail-birded” with dockers as they timed the 6 A.M. workouts of horses. I have licked stamps for a touting agency. I have spent summers traveling on the road with jockeys, trainers, and grooms. I have sat countless hours in horse rooms, legal and illegal, observing the scene. During afternoons at the track, I have spent about equal time in the three main areas of observation—the grandstand, the clubhouse, and the turf club. True, for the greater part of this time I viewed the arena of horse racing with a sociological naivete. But these early experiences furnished a vocabulary that enabled me to participate easily in the social world of horse racing during three years of systematic and sociologically informed observations.

Once I began systematic observations, a knotty problem arose: What to record and when to stop? In my observations, I was sensitive to anything that bore on the conceptual categories developed by Goffman,⁸ plus any hypotheses that were developed in the field. When the field notes piled up, I was forced to come to terms with the problem of criterion of an adequate description: When, I asked, does the field worker know that he has enough data?

One solution to this problem is implied in Ward H. Good-enough’s conception of culture. According to Goodenough, a society’s culture consists “of whatever it is one has to know or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members and do so in any role that they accept for any one of themselves.”⁹ Thus, an adequate description should be sufficiently detailed so that one could write a set of instructions enabling a stranger to reproduce the scenes described. If, for instance, one describes the interaction of a mental patient with other role partners, such as a psychiatrist, a nurse, and so forth, one should write a set of instructions so that a stranger acting them out would be identified by the psychiatrist and the nurse as a mental patient—and they should behave in such a manner that the scenes described would be recreated.

To meet this criterion, one must construct “personal ideal types.” The personal ideal type refers to the construction of a “puppet” endowed “with just that kind of knowledge he needs to perform the job for the sake of which he was brought into the scientific world.”¹⁰ The consciousness given to this puppet is a typification derived from the raw observation of social actors. This constructed consciousness that the observer gives to the puppet must meet the criterion of relevance. That is, the stranger following the model of the personal ideal type behaving in typical situations would be adjudged by social actors as behaving appropriately. The model, then, of an ethnographic description is this: “If a person is in situation X, performance Y [the result of following a set of instructions derived from a description] will be judged appropriate by native actors.”¹¹ While such descriptions (and their reproducability) are not always possible, they represent an ideal for which the sociologist should strive.

Having completed his description, the sociologist has presented a document that can be used by others for a variety of different purposes. Besides this obligation to give an adequate description, the sociologist must also attempt to identify and locate generic social patterns. Unlike the presentation of an adequate description, this is a creative act and can neither be taught nor expected to emerge from every description.

When a generic social pattern is located, it constitutes a separate subject of investigation. A study by Goffman provides one well-known example of what I have in mind. After spending a year of sociological investigation at a mental hospital and writing on its “underlife,” Goffman presumably sifted through his data and emerged with the notion of “total institution” as a possible generic pattern.¹² Then, using total institution as a sensitizing concept, he showed how other organizations having diverse goals —such as military basic training camps and convents—had a similarity of behavior because of the similarity of social structure.

To illustrate further, let me mention briefly an interesting horse racing figure who will be discussed later in greater detail: namely, the “pro” who, on a day-to-day basis, successfully beats the game. What kind of information does the pro require to place successful bets, and how does he secure it? The pro, it turns out, must understand the methods of the trainer, who has a significant role in terms of the gambler’s ability to beat the races. The pro must understand the trainer’s long-term interests and the advantages that accrue to him from losing as well as from winning races. The trainer—as the professional race track gambler comes to understand him—has much to gain by masking his intentions with a given horse until post time. Therefore, a pro must have more than knowledge of the horse’s capacity and past record, of the quality of the jockey, and the nature of the competition. Once the pro has “doped out” a winner on the basis of the above factors, he needs access to the intentions of the trainer.

The trainer must give final instructions to his jockey, either not to press the horse if he does not expect or desire to win, or not to spare the whip if he is going all out to win. These last-minute instructions are given just before the race in a saddling enclosure known as the “paddock.” Thus, in the paddock the trainer can no longer conceal his intentions, because his intentions must be communicated to the jockey. While the trainer can— and does—until the paddock mobilize and direct the activities of his stable without disclosing his intentions, the point is now reached where disclosure becomes necessary for success.

Knowing this, the pro can capitalize upon the fact that the paddock is in open sight of the players at the track. By observing the trainer in interaction with the jockey—and by coming to “know” trainers over the course of time—the pro can read cues that will provide him with decisive betting information. The pro looks for various idiosyncracies—whether the trainer brings his wife or girl friend, whether or not he gives the jockey a ticket on the horse, and so forth—for a tipoff as to the trainer’s intentions.

Note that in this example the research worker has come to view the world of the race track through the eyes of the pro, but not in any vague “subjective” way. The pro is viewed as a person who pursues methods of achieving a payoff, and also as a social actor for whom the “effective structure” of the track (that is, “the way it works”) is vitally important. Thus, by beginning with the professional gambler, the investigator “reaches out” in the course of his study to include jockeys, trainers, stable boys, etc., but in a structured fashion. According to what I said earlier about adequacy of description, the sociologist ought to be in a position now to program the activities of the professional gambler —that is, furnish a set of instructions whereby actors bring about events. If following the rules brings about the event in a recognizable fashion, the program has furnished an adequate description.

As I pointed out, the sociologist must seek the widest possible generalizations from his data. This means he must be sensitive to the idea that his description of a scene might be but an instance of a generic social pattern. When this is done, early discoveries can become sensitizers and guides to later field work in diverse situations.

To illustrate this point, let me return to what I said abo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Aldinetransaction Introduction
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• I The Performers
• II The Audience
• III The Stage Managers
• APPENDIX
• INDEX