He shows the path to wins for Breeders’ Cup bettors – Orange County Register

ARCADIA — Every time a field full of Thoroughbreds leaves the starting gate at Santa Anita Park, a man six stories above them in a press box begins a race of his own.

Curtis Treece, peering through binoculars, begins by quickly reciting the horses’ saddle pad numbers in their first order: In a recent competition: “2, 3, 5, 8, 4, 7, 6, 1.” Treece’s work partner, Ken Davis writes the numbers in a grid. Treece continues, when the horses have traveled a quarter of a mile, and now adds the distances between them: “5, one and a half (lengths); 8, one half; 3, one half; 2, one and a half; 4, one half; 1, one; 7, one; 6.” Davis enters the code into his grid. It continues like this until the horses reach the finish line.

Then the actual sprint begins: After double-checking the horses’ running position via video throughout the race, Treece runs replays on a television screen, makes barely legible notes about each horse’s performance, and then turns to a computer keyboard to to type a succinct message but remarkably complete account of the event.

He only has half an hour before the next race begins.

Treece is the “Chart Caller” – Davis is the “Chart Taker” – responsible for the data and footnotes in the official results tables for Santa Anita, Del Mar and Los Alamitos, which appear on the Equibase and Daily Racing Form websites and in abbreviations Pages with past achievements appear.

This information is crucial for most bettors when it comes to picking winners. That’s especially true this time of year, when handicapped riders count on footnotes from Treece and his colleagues at tracks across the country to help them evaluate often-unknown horses coming into the Breeders’ Cup. Racing’s championship event takes place at Del Mar on November 1st and 2nd (more on Treece’s take on some key horses in a moment).

“Basically, I analyze horse racing,” Treece, 39, said in the press box at Santa Anita, trying to summarize his job. “I try to present it in box score format every 30 minutes.

“What you’re really trying to do in the footnotes is to present what the reader can’t just see in the margins (in the diagram). You want to record whether a horse is uneasy in the gate, whether the horse stumbles or whether the jockey has lost his whip.”

Or when a horse ran into traffic, was involved in a tough duel for the early lead, lost ground by running too far, put up a good fight in the home straight, or just “went crazy” (a popular Treeceism), or one of the countless observations this makes may mean that the horse ran better or worse than the result suggests.

Chart callers see everything, the sublime and the ridiculous. Jack Wilson, a legend in his field, charted Secretariat’s 31-length victory in the 1973 Belmont Stakes and at the end called out “Secretariat, 30,” an astonishingly accurate eye assessment. Wilson also wrote the factual footnote to a race at Miami’s Tropical Park that was run after a native reptile crawled out of an infield pond: A horse named Swamp Rabbit “was running close to the lead when it ran over an alligator.” ”

Treece hasn’t dealt with an alligator yet. The closest he came was when he had to write that horses in the Los Alamitos infield were “shy” from coyotes.

Treece is native to Los Alamitos. He grew up in this Orange County town and attended Los Alamitos High. Curtis’ father, Charles, is one of the great trainers at the nightly Quarter Horse and Thoroughbred meets at Los Alamitos Race Course, and his mother, Debi, works for the Pacific Coast Quarter Horse Racing Association. Curtis met his wife, April, a middle school teacher in Yorba Linda, while she was working in the press box at Los Al.

Curtis’ parents discouraged him from racing, so he earned a degree in communications from Long Beach State University. Then he went into racing.

After topping the night racing charts in Los Angeles for 15 years, he moved to the larger day tracks in Southern California in 2020 to replace the retiring Mike Schneider.

“Once you develop a passion for the game, it just runs deep within you. “Sometimes you can’t believe you’re getting paid for it,” said the affable Treece, whose other sport is bowling – he’s rolled three 300 games.

Even a widely respected chart-topper like Treece hears criticism.

“It’s so subjective,” he said. “Two people can watch a race and you get two different opinions about what’s happening. Sometimes I say “stumbled.” One guy will say, ‘It didn’t matter, why did you say that?’ And another guy will say, ‘That trouble cost (the horse) everything.'”

Treece encourages horse players who read about problems in a footnote to watch a video recording online and judge for themselves whether it’s important.

That could have resulted in a big-money winner for a bettor at Santa Anita last weekend. Quick Omen (who paid $41.60 for a $2 win bet) emerged from a race in which, according to Treece’s abbreviated footnote in the racing form of previous appearances, she was “bp st, 3w, 4-5w into stretch” ( triggered at the end). Start, raced too far in the corner and on the track). Sapadilla ($45.60) was “stabilized early, wide 3-4” — stabilized meaning he paused behind the horses. Toulouse Detrac ($28.80) “Lost Path/Bumped St, 4-5W” – lost path, meaning other horses were in her way.

After evaluating the Del Mar and Santa Anita races for all California Breeders’ Cup candidates, Treece has an opinion. I asked him to elaborate on his chart comments and he emailed me further thoughts.