When intuition meets mathematics: A story that bridges three generations of four horse believers.
There’s something about Saratoga that creates experiences you can’t find anywhere else. It’s a place where an Italian immigrant’s simple number system can reveal mathematical truths, where two scrap dealers’ unwavering confidence in “the four horse” can generate legendary wins, and where a limo bus full of successful businessmen can teach you more about racing than any handicapping book ever could.
These aren’t just stories—they’re the foundation of a systematic approach that bridges three generations of four horse believers.
The Foundation: My Father’s Immigrant Wisdom
My father, Alberico Stucchi, was an Italian immigrant who found joy in the atmosphere of Saratoga Race Course. His system was beautifully simple: exacta box 4 and 8, plus daily double 4 and 8, regardless of which horses were running.
For years, I thought it was just a casual fan’s random approach. I was wrong.
And actually, if you’re a casual fan, that’s not a bad idea. Post positions hit at somewhere around 7% each if distributed evenly across all posts, but certain posts perform much better. If you continue to play the same numbers all the time, you’re likely to catch at least one of them multiple times out of 100 races, which means you’re going to cash some tickets.
The Post 4 Anomaly – Validated:
If you take a look at the winning post positions at Saratoga, for some reason—and I don’t know what it is—historically it seems like the four hole gets an awful lot of winners. Recent analysis confirms this intuition: post position 4 wins at 11.8% at Saratoga—significantly higher than the expected 7.1% if all posts were equal. This represents a 66% advantage over random distribution.
My father’s system, unknowingly, may have been tapping into a legitimate bias. Sometimes intuition and systematic analysis arrive at the same conclusions through different paths.
The Crash Brothers: Utica’s Racing Royalty
If my father discovered the four horse accidentally, Anthony and Ralph Giovinazzo—known throughout Central New York as the “Crash Brothers”—turned it into an art form.
The Characters:
Picture this – two guys straight out of central casting—stout, broad shoulders, unmistakably Italian, cigars perpetually in their mouths, ingratiating and affable, talking to everybody. The whole world loves them. They made it big in the scrap business and went to the track all the time “to do business” and recreate.
They never handicapped a race in their lives, but everybody thinks they always know something because of the way they look.
The Complete Four Horse System:
Every time anyone asked Anthony or Ralph which horse they wanted, they always said “the four horse.”
“I got it on good authority. Gotta bet the four.”Three races later, you’d go back to them and say, “Hey, what horse do you like?” “The four.”
This went on and on and on. To this day, these guys will call me and ask me to bet the four horse for them either in my account, or if I’m at the track—it’s amazing. And not surprisingl, this method has made them some big scores.
The Limo Bus Experience: Saratoga in Style
The Crash Brothers are a force. Although they’re not as young as they used to be and don’t make as many trips to the track as they once did, you always went in style with these guys.
I can remember one time, before I was working with them, when I was invited to Saratoga on a bus trip. This was when I was introduced to almost all of the inner circle of Utica’s most successful group—almost every single one of them second- or third-generation Italians, self-made businessmen who had risen to the top of their respective professions. Utica’s legitimate Goodfellas.
It was an amazing group of people: there was the late Angelo Nole, who had his own construction company; there was Cosmo Saracino, who was a jack of all trades, especially in construction; there was Joseph “Bud” Gigliotti, who was the ultimate lobbyist without a lobbying license; and many others.
The Mobile Palace
The sixteen of us traveled on a limo bus. I had never seen anything like it in my life. We walked onto the bus, and the entire center area was a giant cooler, much to my delight it contained every type of beer, soda, and, of course, Saratoga sparkling water. It wasn’t that everybody was drinking—they weren’t—but it was there if you wanted it.
Of course every type of snack was already stocked from pistachios to “pusties” (An Italian-American version of the famous Italian pastries: “pasticiotti”… a trifle that no respectable Goodfella would leave home without.
As we left for the track around 10 o’clock in the morning, we made our first stop: the King Deli in Herkimer, first order of business, secure the finest sandwich available. There was already plenty of food on the bus, but we had to have those deli sandwiches. Ralph exited the limo-bus—having ordered them ahead of time, so they would be ready—and returned with those unique, perfectly assembled sandwiches.That’s how the day began.
Saratoga in Style
We arrived at the track. If you’re familiar at all with the boxes at Saratoga, you know that those boxes aren’t the biggest in the world. Well, we were some pretty big people, so rather than squeeze into our assigned box space, we decided to secure tables on the patio.
Back then, what was required was “duking” Manny, who was the self-anointed gatekeeper of all clubhouse seating. He made a hell of a living doing it too. A true endorsed legal shakedown. Come to think of it Manny had the same gig at Gulfstream during the winter season. You had to hand it to him, he figured how to “beat the races” without risk.
NYRA later eliminated that loophole by taking control of everything, forcing reservations through the box office via credit cards.
But, back then, $50 to Manny was your “club house pass”. If you knew, you knew.
The Shrimp Summit
So there we were that day—bellies full, a few cocktails in—and the first thing we did when we sat at the table was…wait for it… order food: “Oh yeah, we need shrimp. Lots of it. Bring the shrimp.” In classic Crash Brothers fashion, bounty from the kitchen soon inhabited our table. I had never seen that many shrimp in my life. Then the cocktails started coming, everything was flowing, and I kept asking myself, “How the hell am I going to afford this? What’s my part of this bill going to be?”
Fortunately, the Crash Brothers are very generous people, and they picked up my bill that day—and it wasn’t the first time they had done so over the years. Very generous indeed.
The Luxury Awakening
What I experienced that day for the first time was the luxury side of Saratoga, and I have to admit, I was quite smitten.It was also the first day that I heard about the four horse. As I recall, the four did win a couple of races that day.
The Hot Shot Kid’s Education
I was the hot shot kid in this group who supposedly knew a lot about horses and was expected to come up with winners. Well, as luck would have it that day, I started out having one of the worst days you could imagine. I was zero for six. The guys lost confidence in me and started making their own bets, with varying degrees of success.
They probably shouldn’t have lost faith, by the time the seventh race rolled around, I had found my stride.
The Comeback
I played the seventh and eighth races as a rolling double, and I remember hitting that for what I think paid $63. I had $10 on it. I was off and running.
Then I played the late pick three (at the time there were no pick fours or pick fives available, but even then I could not resist a multi-race bet…as luck would have it, I cashed. It paid something like $460 for a dollars. I basically got all my money back and then some.
The Conspiracy Theory
These guys had stopped following me and kept insisting that I had done it on purpose so I could have the betting pools to myself. We of course know that wasn’t true, but the ribbing I took that day lasted the whole way home and especially through dinner.
The Perfect Ending
After Siro’s (Thats a whole other story) we stopped at Louie Brindisi’s restaurant on Broadway. We had steaks—they were amazing. Louis was a Utica native, well known to this group, a very successful attorney who had developed an appetite for the restaurant business. So he had opened up this spot in Saratoga with his son Andy, and that’s how we ended our day: dinner at Brindisi’s.
It was one of the best days I can remember at the track—not because of the money, but because of the company.
From Stories to Strategy: The Mathematical Bridge
The mathematical validation of my father’s intuitive system and the Crash Brothers’ unwavering confidence in “the four” led me to a fascinating question: if post position 4 shows such a significant edge at Saratoga, what happens when we expand that concept to include all the inside posts that benefit from Saratoga’s documented rail bias?
This thinking evolved into what I call the 1-2-3-4 experiment—a systematic approach that combines the wisdom of three generations of four horse believers with the mathematical reality of Saratoga’s inner turf course bias in two-turn route races.
Given that the inner turf course shows a 123% advantage for inside posts in these longer races, and knowing the preponderance of the four horse winning races at Saratoga, we can box the 1-2-3-4 on inner turf routes for exactas, trifectas, and superfectas and might actually come out with a positive ROI. We are going to find out!
This story is excerpted from my upcoming book “Unlocking Saratoga: A Complete Guide to Data-Driven Handicapping,” which documents 30 years of systematic analysis at America’s premier racing venue—including a documented 129.31% ROI during the challenging 2025 Belmont at Saratoga Festival. Coming July 2025.
