You hear it nearly every day you go to the racetrack, in one corner of the plant or another. It gets repeated so often it’s a mantra gone wrong. Instead of deepening a connection, this phrase really is a justification, a way of letting oneself off the hook. “I’m a good handicapper but a terrible bettor.” In many instances, it’s not true at all. Many players who proclaim themselves to be good handicappers have merely come up with some kernel of a clever idea but failed to fully analyze the race in a way where they maximize their chances of winning. Handicapping, in the truest sense, involves a weighing up of every horse’s chance to win a given race. It takes a combination of skill and hard work that goes beyond merely recognizing an angle and latching onto it to the exclusion of everything else. But I’ve met plenty of players for whom the above words are dead on. They might be able to quote the past performances as if they were etched in their cerebral cortexes. They may even have an excellent intuitive sense of value. But when it comes to writing the bets to take advantage of these good opinions, they are lost. Take the guy I call the Ice Cream Man. He’s been coming to Saratoga for a couple of decades, initially behind the wheel of an actual ice cream truck. When it comes to analyzing races, he comes up with some genuinely clever ideas. It’s because of him that I’ll never forget the 2017 Carter. He texted me that morning to let me know that he loved Green Gratto in the race. He believed the course was going to play to speed and thought that Gaston Grant’s bay colt would be such a big longshot that the other riders would give rider Chris DeCarlo too much rope. He was dead right, and when the 54-1 shot held off Unified to win by a neck, I could only imagine the money he’d won. I thought ahead a few months to Saratoga, where I thought I might be able to get him to pick up the check at Peck’s Arcade in Troy, N.Y., my favorite restaurant within 100 miles of Saratoga. My reverie didn’t last long. I still don’t fully understand how this is possible, but the Ice Cream Man missed the race. At first, I thought he must have gotten shut out – we’ve all been there – but that wasn’t the case. “I tried to beat Unified out of the exacta,” he said. “I thought he was overbet and that I could really hit a home run by tossing him.” I didn’t know where to begin. First of all, Unified was deservedly odds-on and looked extremely live. That aside, there’s this obscure exotic wager called “win” that every player should be conscious of when his selection is north of 6-1, let alone nearly 60-1. There would be no Peck’s Arcade for me. The Ice Cream Man was at it again at Saratoga this past Wednesday. He made at least semi-compelling cases about the odds for Questeq (second at 44-1 in the seventh race), Leaveematthegate (second at 31-1 in the eighth), and even Thirteen Songs (fourth at 35-1 in the Honorable Miss). Do I even need to tell you he didn’t cash a ticket in the sequence? In at least one instance, he broke the famed Rullah rule (see Mike Maloney’s “Betting With an Edge” for details): He played the exacta in the eighth with every horse but the winner over Leaveematthegate. This, my friends, is a good handicapper and a terrible bettor. For a long time, I’ve suggested fixed-bankroll contests as a way for him to maximize his returns. He still hasn’t listened to me. Maybe instead he’ll listen to contest veteran Mike Labriola. “In the first tournament I played in, I didn’t get anything in terms of remuneration, but I knew that eventually I would,” Labriola said in “The Winning Contest Player.” “I loved that tournaments took the betting-mistakes part of horseplaying out of the equation. It was all about who could pick winners and who could pick longshot winners, and I knew that was me.” So, Ice Cream Man, if you’re reading this, I recommend DRF Tournaments as well as the Saratoga Low Roller contests that take place every Sunday and Monday. You sign up in the first floor of the grandstand next to the Fourstardave bar. And when you win one of these things, I’ll take that dinner at Peck’s Arcade.