However, in the short run, crowds are subject to groupthink, a contagious situation that crushes the usual collective wisdom of the many. Such moments of groupthink nullify the healthy diversity of the crowd, creating periods of crazes, stock market bubbles and, from our point of view as horseplayers, false consensus choices. In such periods when the crowd acts without its normal diversity, the consensus becomes a tyrant.

In racing, the public outperforms the experts in picking winners. However, the public is punished by the takeout. If you believe that most horses are underlays but some are overlays, then you should be able to consider the possibility that an opinion coming from an informed minority might outperform an intelligent majority under certain “laboratory” conditions.

Forget the fact that favorites outperform longshots. We are not comparing all favorites with all longshots. We are looking for that rare longshot that offers much more in the way of return than it rightfully should.

To find such horses we need to know just as much about crowd psychology as we do about handicapping, maybe more. The crowd prone to occasional irrational situations that James Quinn has called “maximum confusion”?

For the past two decades, I have been exploring the possibility that an opinion coming from an informed minority, in maximum confusion scenarios, is worth betting on. This is what I call anti-handicapping. During this period, other research projects have come and gone, but this one continues to reappear in different dress. You can find parallels to this concept in stock markets and other investment situations.

The fact that we have groups of public handicappers offering their top picks allows us near laboratory conditions for researching the informed minority. For research purposes, I have defined it as follows:

An “informed minority” is a public handicapper of proven skills who picks a horse that no other public handicapper within the consensus has picked.

I have recognized that my samples have not been “pure.” For example, if you have a newspaper with only five public pickers, then a minority of one voice might be (a) a coincidental minority; (b) a sloppy handicapper or one who had a bad night and did his job with a hangover.

In cases where there have been as few as five handicappers, I would require that the minority voice would have chosen a horse to win that no other handicapper picked in the money. With larger groups of public handicappers, such as in Daily Racing Form on Breeders’ Cup Day, with dozens of public pickers, I would simply demand that the “informed minority” be the lone handicapper to pick a horse on top.

You might suspect some trashy picks from bad handicappers, but in fact, the worst public handicappers tend to pick mostly chalk on top, so they rarely end up in my minority tallies.

In any case, the results of my own research, supported by separate research samples sent to me from various readers, show that the concept of the informed minority may indeed be profitable.

In further analysis, I have found a protypical situation when the informed minority method kicks in. This is the case of the contentious race (or the negatively contentious race) with no clear standout. As with all races, this type of race forcibly ends up with a consensus. But the consensus is a mere amalgam of handicappers trying to squeeze blood from a turnip.

One prime example can be seen in the 2003 Breeders’ Cup Sprint, in which many horses had positive attributes but each of these also had serious knocks. In such a scenario, we are not necessarily looking for a contrarian handicapper, but one who is (1) astute enough to recognize race situations in which anything can happen, and (2) has the courage to put a speculative value possibility on top. In this case, the handicapper was Andrew Beyer, the only public picker on the whole DRF staff to pick Cajun Beat on top. One of my readers told me that he collected on Cajun Beat (the horse paid $47.60) and that the “informed minority” method I’d written about years ago was his sole reason for making the play.

Does this mean that we should be betting on Beyer every time? Not at all. Like most great handicappers (and there are many), Beyer’s success rests in his ability to occasionally soar sublimely above the crowd. The “informed minority” factor is one way to identify such occasions.

If any public handicapper could be played all the time, it is Nick Kling of the Troy Register in upstate New York. Nick often goes through entire New York meets, and even consecutive meets, with a flat-bet profit. It’s a small profit, but be aware that under such impossible requirements, the vast majority of public handicappers show a negative return on investment.

I played the 1998 Breeders’ Cup from the Albany, New York OTB. I had the public selections of the Capital Region handicappers (Albany, Schenectady and Troy), a very talented bunch. I knew how good they were from my prior visits to Saratoga. These guys were my “laboratory” for informed minority performance.

The BC Mile of 1998 was one of those wide-open events in which the favorite on any consensus would be a blend of desperation. I had my longshot chosen. However, I noticed that Nick Kling was the lone Capital Region handicapper to have put Da Hoss on top.

Da Hoss had already won a BC Mile two years earlier. Since then, he only raced a single time, a winning effort in a modest allowance prep at Colonial.

My respect for the informed minority synchronized with my respect for a handicapper who could achieve the unimaginable: a flat-bet profit for entire meets, when being forced to pick a horse in every single race, even races he hated.

For this double reason alone (informed minority / Nick Kling), I made a saver bet on Da Hoss. The return of $25.20 allowed me to enter later races with the confidence I needed for the right decisions. This was thanks to someone else: not a tout but someone who represented the informed minority.

In the 2004 Claiming Crown at Canterbury Park, I found myself in a position to study the informed-minority factor from a very unique position: the informed minority was me! There were six races in the Claiming Crown, but in only one did I have the courage to put a horse on top that no one else would dare to pick. This was Chisholm in the Express, the fifth race.

If I were looking at myself through a microscope, I would have discovered that for five of the six Claiming Crown races I was a very ordinary handicapper.

Why had I placed Chisholm on top? First, because I had good information. I had spoken to the trainer and learned from his entourage that Chisholm’s prior Canterbury sprint win had probably been faster than the official time, placing him at least on a par with the other contenders coming from more fashionable stables. Even though I could not really separate Chisholm from three or four other horses, he represented what would be the best pari-mutuel value in a highly speculative race scenario.

I ended up with two winners on top in six races, Chisholm at $20.00 and an odds-on horse. I looked back at the six races and wondered why I could not have picked another Chisholm on one of the other races. I realized that only on rare occasions was I capable of finding special information for a truly contentious race. As a handicapper, I am condemned to think like the crowd most of the time, and this is not a bad thing, for in most cases, the “wisdom of crowds” kicks in.

The irony here is that the player who follows the informed-minority method and used me as a member of his public handicapper “stable,” would have bet my picks in only one race. Thus, he would have done better than I did.

What better argument in favor of the informed minority ... and also in favor of passing races when you have no insight that soars above the crowd. The universal message here is to save your investing for only those few races when you are capable of being different, not only because your handicapping has sharpened but because the crowd has become confused.

What remains is to work out an entirely mechanical method of applying the informed minority. A colleague of mine, Mike, compiled the following stats. During the past five years of Breeders’ Cups (since the DRF has dished out the picks of more than 30 public handicappers), betting blindly on the informed minority yielded a 119 percent return on investment. The depressing downside was that there were only 9.6 percent winners, and you’d have gone 0 for 17 in 2004. Backing them up to show yielded a positive 19 percent return on investment for the same five BC period, considerably reducing volatility, with 25 hits in 83 tries, including an 18 percent profit for the dreadful year of 2004.

This is just the beginning. With more and better public handicappers at different racing circuits, we have an available laboratory to pursue this exciting research.

Mark Cramer can be reached through his Web site: www.altiplanopublications.com.