I watched the Preakness States from a simulcast venue and sat in a television carrel next to a man who had subscribed to a computer service for picking winners. He had sheets of numbers and power ratings taped all around the walls of his cubicle.

What follows came to mind: When I first began going to the races in Hot Springs, Ark. -- 20-plus years ago -- atmosphere was a major selling point.

Characters were all around.

So were tip sheets.

One of these tip sheets was named Ike's.

As you approached the race track, a man could be seen walking down the middle of the street so that he could work the crowds on both sides. He had pieces of paper in both hands and would loudly proclaim, "Here I is!"

People would actually run to him so that they could give him their money before he ran out of tip sheets. Sometimes he would say he only had nine left. This would have truly been the case. Then he would go mimeograph 50 more.

You had to listen carefully to what was said outside a colorful track.

It's like when the carny at the milk bottle game on the midway says, "Step right up, there's a winner every time."

It's true. It's just that sometimes the winner is the carny.

When a tip sheet hustler says of a former edition, "Had five winners," you should always remember to check the date. It's hustled as though it had been yesterday. But it could have been eight or nine months ago.

What I always wondered about Ike was why he was so nice to people like me - trying to give us money he could have had.

Something else that I recalled while watching the man next to me collect his Preakness picks off the computer program last week was the college course about novel writing that I took from a man who had never written a novel.

And while on the subject of people helping you out of the kindness of their hearts for a relatively small amount of money, who can ever forget the infomercials that run in the middle of the night and tip you off to making $1 million off broken-down real estate for $39.95, a million that he, the info-man could have made himself if his heart hadn't been so big.

The touting business has come a long way since Ike waved down traffic and sold his hot tips to motorists as well as pedestrians.

Now the sheets have names like Power Stat Flex, instead of Ike's, and there are rows and rows of figures next to a horse's name.

There are two questions that somebody will have to answer before I will subscribe to a tout sheet that comes from a computer program.

One is, "What information does a tout sheet producer have that I don't have?"

The second question is, "Why would somebody sell information if they could use it to make a fortune for themselves at the windows?"

People who buy horse race services and bet these touts watch races differently than somebody who does his own handicapping.

People who bet somebody else's picks tend to sit quietly because there's not so much to take personally.

After a race was run from an eastern track Preakness day, I asked the man sitting next to me if his service had that winner, which paid $8-something, and he said that it had.

I asked if I could see, and he said yes and handed me several yards worth of print-out paper.

What you got for your money here was a race that was broken down into a number of categories like speed, breeding, recent closing fractions, class and track variations. Some services, in fact, seem reminiscent of the Horse Race Analyzer that most people got in a Christmas stocking at least once. The Analyzer was a hand-held computer into which you punched recent form and money winnings and times, and up popped the favorite to show, looking like a sound wager.

On the print-outs I borrowed from the man sitting next to me on Preakness day, power ratings were listed for horses in an average of five categories in most races.

This particular race, a different horse had the highest power rating in each of the five categories.

The horse that won had the best rating in the category that apparently had to do with recent earnings.

So this could be said of the program in this instance: Had the winner.

The following also rang true: Had four losers.

Thus, marketing and presentation remain an important part of the tout business, whether you get your picks from a man waving colored sheets of mimeographed paper in the middle of the street, or from a laser printer.