Racing Maxims & Methods of Pittsburg Phill

Smith, otherwise known as Pittsburg Phil, became a well-known handicapper. Photos by Wikimedia Commons. In the years before , when the Daily Racing Form first started publishing, there was only one way to handicap horse races with past performance charts - you had to make the charts yourself. The number of people who were compiling data on horse races and making their own charts prior to the s was most likely very small, but nobody was as successful at using racing data to inform his bets than a young man from outside of Pittsburgh named George E.

Smith was the son of two immigrants, a mother from Ireland and a father from Germany. His father died when he was very young, so Smith was forced to work in a Pennsylvania cork factory to help his family make ends meet. He parlayed his success in cockfighting to placing bets on baseball games. Here, too, he had some success, and soon contemplated leaving the cork factory completely.

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While hanging around Pittsburgh pool halls making sports wagers, Smith would pay attention to the calls of racing results coming in over the wire. He kept notes on each race, and eventually noticed patterns. He won a little money betting on horses he had been tracking, and decided there was an angle to exploit by keeping good notes. Smith quit his job at the factory and increased his wagers on horses. He broke the streak that year when he went to watch Joe Cotton win the Kentucky Derby. Smith eventually landed in Chicago, where he upped his action and grew to become one of the largest horse racing gamblers in America.

His wagers were written about in newspapers alongside of racing recaps. Pittsburg Phil grew wealthy enough to start his own stable and run his own racehorses. He had trouble as a horseman, largely due to his associations and partnerships with jockeys.

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Pittsburg Phil then employed the jockey Willie Shaw, but Shaw also raced under a cloud of suspicion for cheating. Google is your friend. So sometimes is fat thumbing. Smith turned out to be Canadian businessman and Conservative politician.

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Smith, which is what I googled in error, turned out to be both the guitarist , or a gambler. Not just any gambler. George Elsworth Smith, aka Pittsburgh Phil, was a byword for astute horse picking.

Call him the Warren Buffett of the turf. He did his homework, bet only when it made sense, and wound up making millions. Millions in pre-World War One dollars. Not that you would have bet on him as a super star out of the gate. His parents were low modest. His father died when he was eleven, and he was forced to his first job was cutting cork for five dollars a week.

Always on the look out for a way to bring home more money, George took a plunger on raising game cocks. They tended to win.

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It was there that he first discovered the horses. For him, however, it was all about the numbers. He started making charts of who won, and where they placed at various points in the races. He listened for a year before laying down money. He won of course and a career was born.

The Legend of Pittsburg Phil

Of course a consistent winner attracts attention and pretty soon he was having a hard time getting the odds-makers to take his bets. So it was off first to Churchill Downs to take a look at a real live horse race, then to Chicago where the field was wider and his reputation did not precede him. The anonymity of the name Smith helped. There were enough of those around that in Chicago he was dubbed Pittsburgh Phil presumably as in Philadelphia, and not to be confused with the Murder Inc contractor by the auctioneer to distinguish him from others of the same name.

Here too he was followed, and lost the odds with the bookmakers.

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Here too he began the use of a beard to place his bets. It was to him not simply a matter of judging horseflesh, but also noting what factors brought out the best and the worst in them. He was a connoisseur of the horse that liked mud , or not, and just as important, the jockey who liked mud, or not.

And he kept it all in the family. Beards had to be changed regularly as they became familiar to the bookies, but for his trainer, he brought in his brother William, a railroad brakeman, who somehow managed to be quite good at the job. You can have bad streaks and Smith had his share. By the bookies were cheerfully taking money off him as race after race went south. He was always careful not to let it upset his strategy. Smith had a long term view and he was confident that with his latest purchase, his luck, to the extent it was luck, was about to change.

In September, he brought the two year old King Cadmus to Sheepshead bay. The oddsmakers were feeling their oats and Smiths beards at the track and in other cities were quietly getting good odds. He was not a shouter at the track, or anywhere else for that matter.