Who is Clockers' Corner

CLOCKERSCORNER.COM was launched in the summer of 2012. Our contender selections are the product of calculations formulated by rigourous, continually ongoing research and development.

The process of continuous trial and error experimentation, testing and updating has included literally thousands of man-hours in the areas of advanced statistical analysis, complexity, computation, probability, algorithm programming and artificial intelligence executed on an almost daily basis over the past seven years - just to get to the point where we are now.

Unique formulas carried out by execution of a set of proprietary algorithms, individually designed to classify and rate specific handicapping factors, and specific characterics of the thoroughbred race horse, then utilize the quantified values to compare contenders, conditions and circumstances with deep learning - artificial intelligence; in order to determine probability with mathematical certainty and thus, be able to identify the most probable WINNER of any given horse race.

Who is clockerscorner.com?

The question continues to arise, and so, in response to the communications received via both our site e-mail and twitter, the time has come to answer the numerous calls for clarification. First and foremost, we are horse players just like you. Secondly, we are not affilliated with Santa Anita Park, Rosie or the restaurant, Hollywood Park, Del Mar or any other racetrack.

Moreover, it has literally taken a team of women and men to make this website a reality, including, but not limited to, my wife Veronica, mother Rosario, and daughters Cristina and Sakti. However, the driving force, the number one believer, the one who makes it happen every day, the creator and principal developer of the algorithms, computer programmer, daily handicapper, content producer, web designer, bankroller, driver-to-the-track, purchaser of tickets, payer-of-expenses (ie. Form, Program, Parking, Gate, Gas, Cigarrettes, etc.); would be this author, your humble servant, horse-miner and mutuel-harvester.

No doubt, if you've ever frequented Clocker's Corner in the mornings at any time during the past ten or so years; then you've seen my face. Tall, thin-build, full beard, dark sunglasses, racing form under my arm, pack of yellow American Spirit cigarrettes; mostly keep to myself, but always greet everyone. The nut-job with a white car who used to feed the birds every morning in the parking lot at Santa Anita (hundreds of birds would come in waves), well that was me. Know some folks on the front and back sides, but not too many folks actually know me, who I am, where I come from, or what I am about. Seen every day but never really noticed and that's sort of the way I like it.

Been around long enough though, back in 05' Chris Paasch gave me "Diplomat Lady" to WIN the Starlet (happened to be sitting next to each other that day at Hollywood) she paid $80.00, still remember him yellin' "C'mon Tyler" when she hit the far turn, what a good hit. Another time about five years ago, on a Sunday morning I will never forget, Bruno told me about a highly-rated maiden filly (it was the first time I saw my favorite horse ever, The Great Zenyatta, during a morning workout with David Flores himself up, at Hollywood Park

Dedicated to Dad

Introduced to Horse Racing by one helluva man, my father; at the wee age of - too young to actually remember. By the time I was 2, dad had already lost an 8-unit apartment building on Las Palmas, in Hollywood; which he and my mom bought when they got here from Cuba. As the story goes, he took out a mortgage, went to the track with the cash, and proceeded to bet the whole roll TO-WIN, on a horse named Omar. Years later he would tell me the story his way, "Can you imagine me, unclogging toilets - fuck that shit".

Dad didn't just have cojones, HE WAS 100% PURE COJONES. Lived on-his-own-terms, what an understatement. To this day, and forever, I have been the only one of my friends, and out of anybody that I have met; I am the only person that I know who has ever touched a five-hundred-dollar bill in real life, have you? Dad kept stacks of $500 bills and when I got older and asked him where that cash came from, he explained that when I was small, the racetrack paid in $500 bills.

He used to buy cars at the County auction, once in 1970 he bought a big red L.A. County fire engine for $750.00, brought it home and parked it behind his XK Jaguar in the driveway of our house at 822 S Masselin Ave. Imagine a kid with a real fire engine to play with, well that was me at five years old.

In the middle of the Arab oil embargo 73' when everybody's panicking, he goes and buys a brand new Cadillac Eldorado (it had a phone that connected calls through a mobile operator), and a Firebird 400 Muscle car to go along with a Country Squire station wagon for mom, all during the so-called energy crisis.

Dad was a genius, not a gambler by profession but by true heart, gutt, cojones, intuition, call it what you may; ten grand on the superbowl was nothing to him, in fact in Miami, he has given me the cash and sent me to pay the bookie the $10,500, on the Monday morning after the super bowl on more than one occasion (I've gone to pick up the $9,500 too). When I was a kid, I can remember times counting out $35K with my dad in the back of a limo on the way to the track; and I remember times picking horses with Maria my step-mom, and checking the previous day's results out of the newspaper by candle-light, because the electricity was disconnected at his apartment in Silverlake.

He made and spent millions of dollars in the 70's as a Rock N' Roll concert promoter, artist manager, and through other recording businesses; and then hit broke in the late 80's (well broke for him, was no swimming pool, in the poor section of Beverly Hills - anything south of Wilshire, he was broke at 232 "S" El Camino) but by 1993 he was living high again, where he liked it, north of Santa Monica in the flats at 527 "N" Rexford.

You see in 1979, my father negotiated a record deal with his friend Tommy Mottola, and that deal became sort of an industry template, pioneering what is commonly referred to in the music industry today as the "Multi-Label Production Deal".

But there was no such animal back then, my father created it, made it happen by his pure cojones, kicking down the door and paving the way for so many who would get the chance to walk through it and make millions too, such as Russell Simons (Def Jam Records), Tyrone Williams (Cold Chillin), Suge Knight (Death Row Records), Steve Harvey (Live at the Apollo), Gloria Estefan (Miami Sound Machine), I could go on and on naming people who without a doubt, made their fortunes and careers with their own blood and sweat, but may never have gotten the opportunity to do so, were it not for my father and his huge brass cojones...

And so as it turned out, his companies from the 1970's (TERCER MUNDO, INC and some others) owned 100% of the copyrights in and to some musical compositions and sound recordings. A catalog of 163 songs which became quite valuable because they had been sampled by so many Rap artists, so many times, on so many million-selling rap albums, that each and all of the six major record companies owed him a ton of money, he sued and got another bunch of millions through various settlements and deals (Brian Turner, CEO of Priority Records paid him two million in a deal for the use of just one song "One Nation Under a Groove" on "Ice Cube's" album of the same title in 1992).

He would go on to spend it all and be broke again by 1998, even got evicted from the Rexford house by the Sherriff's, slipped, broke his leg, and ended up in the hospital; but then as usual, he pulls a rabbit out of his hat. Ultimately, the big-time music industry lawyers screwed him, and I think he knew he was getting screwed but just needed the money and had no choice. All I know is they structured the deal so the only way he could get any money was to sign over his ownership interest in the copyrights as colateral, but he got more millions, moved his family to Key Biscayne, took on a mistress, had a daughter at 63 (my sister Amba Montes de Oca who is now 12 and living in Spain with her mother), and continued spending like there was no tomorrow, for a few more years until there was no more to spend.

The last thing I will tell you, while I apologize for continuing on and on about my dad, but after all, if you want to know who is CLOCKERSCORNER.COM, then you should know these things. If you have ever been to a concert at any racetrack, then you can thank my father, INOCENTE LUIS MONTES DE OCA LAMAR, aka NENE MONTES, aka "EL NENE". That's right, he was the one who realized what a great venue racetracks are.

It was 1984, at Hialeah Park, the first concert ever to be held at any racetrack in the USA and the whole thing was my dad's brain-child, he promoted the concert and made it happen, "FIESTA EN HIALEAH" starring among others Gloria Estefan and the Maimi Sound Machine (My father hired them to play the gig for $7,500 (try and do that today). I personally went with my dad to take the check to Emilio Estefan's house, which was deep in Kendall, right off of Coral Way and 107th Avenue, behind FIU, way before the fame and Star Island days.

At the end of the concert, my father brought all the bands, musicians and artists to the stage, it was Georger Clinton, Parliament Funkadelic, The Miami Sound Machine, Francisco Aguabella, Frankie Beverly and Maze, Hansel y Raul that I can remember, there were many others. It was a concaphony of American and Latin musicians and bands Rockin' Out together on the stage. To close out the show, my dad had Francisco start to play the Congas and all the bands formed a conga line on the stage, the crowd (largely of Cuban descent) went wild and the conga line danced into the crowd who quickly joined in. It may have been the biggest conga line in history, that started with a few artists on the stage and ended up with thousands of humans dancing to the music. Three months later, Emilio and Gloria Estefan, who led the conga line my dad had started with Francisco on the stage, released their breakout worldwide smash hit "Come on Shake Your Body Baby do that Conga".

We are talking about someone who lived LARGER THAN LIFE! A man who never went to the track broke looking to make a dollar from a dime. He would say, "El Hombre Que Juega Por Necesidad, Pierde Por Obligacion"... The Man Who Gambles Out Of Necessity, Loses By Obligation. Yet my own eyes have seen my father go to Hollywood Park in a limo with $50K cash (on a Memorial Day in 1981), and leave with $150K cash (100K Profit in one day), making nothing but WIN bets, after dropping twelve-grand on the first three races, listening to Milton Lopez - but that's a whole other story.

And so it came to pass, at 2:22 p.m. on a sunny afternoon in the City of Los Angeles 2012, amidst the summer heat and excitement of the fireworks displays, that this TITAN, "Six foot four and Drunk as an Irishman" wrote his good friend David Carradine (Rest in Peace) about my father in his autobiography entitled "CARRADINE" (David Carradine gave me my first dog "Kimba", son of "Buffalo", Rest in Peace Old Friends); the man who took me so many places, taught me so many things, and gave me so many gifts, including the gift of being a horse player; looked into my eyes for one final time as if to say "Here I Go", and then just like that, made his transition to the higher plane of existence. Liberated on the Fourth of July, out with a bang, that was your style. Rest in Peace Father, I love you, and you will be missed for sure, but never forgotten. Thank you for everything. May God Bless You.

And do you know that right up until the end, this man of seventy-five years continued giving and teaching me so much, how to make one's transition without fear, with dignity, in control of all bodily faculties and functions, coherent right up until his final mili-second on this plane. He was so far beyond horse racing, I would talk to him about algorithms and he would tell me about "GAIA" and "UNIVERSAL COMPUTATION", while I was trying to solve a race, he was literally trying to solve the problems of the human race.

But he did like the concept of the algorithms and I could tell he was proud of my genius for having been able to develop and experience some degree of documented success with them. One thing he told me is don't ever charge money for the data, make it available FREE-OF-CHARGE and AD-FREE; and the tremendous response we have enjoyed since launching the website has proven him right.

In so many ways, he is directly and indirectly responsible for the algorithms, website and content: twenty years ago, he opened my eyes and pointed me towards chaos, complexity and random self-organized systems. It was thirty-Five years ago, when he taught me about the concept of "entelechy"..., which as he defined it: potential existence as opposed to existing reality. Did you catch that, or did it zip right by? Let me say it again, but this time please read the words more carefully: POTENTIAL EXISTENCE AS OPPOSED TO EXISTING REALITY.

As fate would have it, we have created a mathematical formula and figure called "Entelechy" to represent the fully exhausted or unexpired "potential existence" from a horse's past performance running line. To explain, this powerful new figure is an attempt to quantify a racehorses' potential to improve or regress today, which may not be reflected or otherwise visible to horse players in the past performances due to unknown handicapping factors.

For all of the above stated reasons, and some others too (believe me I haven't scratched the surface when it comes to my dad); you can understand now why my father is almost directly responsible for so many things, the algorithms, the website, the data being made available FREE-OF-CHARGE and AD-FREE, the fact that we finally stopped procrastinating, actually built the website and decided to undertake the task of making the algorithms available to bettors on a daily basis, and even for the concert they will have at Hollywood Park this Friday night. And since it wasn't until after he made his transition, that we actually felt the fire-in-the-belly to launch and dedicate the website; we would hope you agree that irrespective of our opinions, he is well deserving of the space occupied by each and every word written above, in the context of answering the question, Who is CLOCKERSCORNER.COM?

In House Handicapper

Your servant, Omar Yul Montes de Oca. Born in Lansing, Michigan, on November 2, 1965. As American as Ford, Chrysler, General Motors, Horse Racing and apple pie. Parents came to the United States from Cuba in 1963 and for me Thoroughbred Horse Racing is one of the last standing, if not the last bastion where the great American Dream continues to thrive.

A 47-year-old, Cuban American, husband and father of four daughters ages 19-years through 11-months-old. Lover of trees, animals, music, nature, the universe and this precious gift of life; student of algorithms, probability, complexity, and quantum physics; computer technician/geek, network administrator, systems engineer, internet programmer, mathematician, horse player. Microsoft Windows Certified "Master", top score out of all test-takers in the City of Los Angeles - 4th in the nation, stands to this day.

Horse Racing was a Bad Word

By 1974, my mom just couldn't take it any more; the women, the booze, the ups and downs of flying high one day, broke the next. My parents divorced, it was ugly with two kids in the middle; and to top it off, my new step-mom Maria had been my mom's best friend "Aunt Maria". So dad left to create his new family with Maria while my sister Cristina and I stayed with mom. Cut to the chase, basically from the time I was seven-years-old horse racing was a BAD WORD at home. (Except for the times when my dad would come down to Silverlake in a limo to pick me up, all the neighborhood kids would run behind the limo all the way down the block to my house; and it would be a weekend or a week at dad's, in another world, limos, airplanes, hotels, rock n' roll concerts, and yes, horse racing, Santa Anita, Hollywood, Del Mar, and the Pomona fair too).

The Birth of an Algorithm

But since horse racing was a bad word in my own home for so many years, it took until I was 35 to find my way to a racetrack. It wasn't until December of 2000, that I got this really great job in Puerto Rico, to setup and administer some webservers, with an 96-port ascend router for a dial-up Internet Service Provider in San Juan. I ended up living in Puerto Rico for almost the whole year of 2001, until 9/11 when I returned to the states as soon as it was possible.

One thing about Puerto Rico if you didn't know, Puerto Rico is an island of Horse Players. Everybody on the island plays horses. There's only one racetrack "El Comandante" (The Commander), but they have "Agencias Hipicas" Off-Track Betting Agencies all over the island, literally on every block in some areas.

One of the guys I worked with was an avid, a daily horse player, and so it wasn't long (being a tourist and all) before I was inside of an Off-Track betting parlor. Now in Puerto Rico there's no Daily Racing Form, they have a "revista" (magazine); and not only that, it's not like everybody gets to have their own, there is only one for the whole betting parlor and those interested, have to pass it around, so I'd say the best you can do is get about 2-5 minutes to look at the pp's in a race and make your selection.

But something peculiar happened, when we picked up that "revista" with the pp's and looked at it for the first time. Realized right-off-the-bat we knew what a furlong was, what's more, we knew 12-seconds was the average-time for a furlong; knew how to read a running line, knew what the first, second, third and fourth call times were, how to read the beaten lengths at each call, and even the down and dirty rule each length = a fifth, knew what a maiden was, the difference between a sprint and a route, a frontrunner and a closer, post position, workouts, weight, earnings, odds, the toteboard, purse monies, win, place, show, exactas, payouts, we knew more than the guy who took us to the Off-Track betting parlor.

It was like a light bulb had gone off in my head, felt right at home, and it wasn't long before we were uncovering winners. At first we started using final-time at the distance. Very quickly, we began to incorporate earnings into our calculations, then WIN percentage, In-the-Money Percentage, and the algorithms were born. Since we had to share the pp's, needed a fast way to go over each race, so we'd very quickly look at the Final Time, Earnings, Win and In-the-Money Percentages of each horse, to find the main contenders, then absent anything obvious (and I mean really obvious because we didn't know shit from shinola at that point), we would keep the one(s) who ran fastest during the "stretch" call - because I heard my dad say more than once, "the real race starts when they hit the stretch.

You'd be surprised how well that little system worked in Puerto Rico. In maiden claiming and maiden races, all I had to do was sort the entries by their In-the-Money percentage; and they would often come in one, two, three, exactly in that order (By the way: that works on most minor USA tracks, I hit a $5,000 trifecta at Parx, on a $6-ticket just by boxing the three horses with the highest In-the-Money Percentage - Only in msw and maiden claiming races and only at minor tracks, I've tested it at Parx, Lone Star and Penn National, it works).

It got to be so guys in the Betting Parlor didn't even care about using the "revista" too much, yeah they looked at it, but what they really wanted to know was which horse we were betting on, and I would tell them, and they would leave us with the pp's for as long as we needed them, no matter how crowded the joint was, they just wanted the algorithm output.

Cutting our Teeth

Upon returning to the states in 2002, it wasn't instantly that we picked up a racing form and headed for the track but the bug was there; and eventually, we were at Hollywood Park playing horses. Then little by little, as our interest continued to grow, horse racing began to take a more prominent roll, we began reading, studying, practicing, until we were living and breating horse racing. Then we began to combine horse racing with our computer and mathematical skills, this shift occured over a period of a couple years, but by 2004; the original algorithm ("FORM") was up and running 100% exactly the way it is today.

And then the winners started to come in more often and more consistently right away, at least 2, 3 or 4 per day, we now had our own consistent race-to-race barrometer. This original algorithm ("FORM") eventually evolved into its natural place within an algorithm set, which includes ADJUSTED-CLASS and COMBINED-SPEED-PACE. We continued using only the FORM algorithm for about the next five years and it did pretty good just by itself.

In March 2007, the FORM algorithm hit the PICK-SIX for the first time at The Great Race Place. It was the day RAGS TO RICHES won the Santa Anita Oaks with Garrett Gomez aboard, we had GoGo singled on the last two legs of a $40-dollar ticket, the last race was a maiden race coming down the hill, and just before they hit the dirt GoGo made a power move from mid-pack into the lead and we never looked back, the PICK-SIX paid $4,700 that day for our $40-ticket. But it had been one of those days when everything we threw out there was hitting, and we already had $10-Grand in our pocket, so we didn't even cash the ticket for a couple weeks.

Soon after that, we hit the PICK-SIX again at Santa Anita Park, on December 26, 2007 (Opening Day), again with a $40-ticket, but this time it paid $27K. That's about when we became full-time horse player/handicappers; and thus began the journey down-the-road, in development of our present-day working algorithm-set.

Thanks for your interest, thanks for your time, thank you for reading this, and thanks for your visit to our website. We are grateful for the efforts of the riders, trainers, owners, grooms, stall muckers and all who work every day in Thoroughbred Horse Racing; but most of all we are grateful to those graceful and beautiful animals, God bless the horses.

CU@the$Window!.