Come on, Len. Knock it off.

[Chuckles_the_Clown2]

Class there is no way to tell what the \"best\" figure is.  The issue is whether the figures are accurate enough to isolate winners. The only way to tell that is to determine success rates using them.

Unless I\'m missing what you\'re implying.

classhandicapper Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> That might be an interesting handicapping contest
> but it wouldn\'t say much about the figures. It
> would say something about the skill of the
> handicappers. The only way to measure the figures
> is to remove all human/subjective elements from
> the selections - like best figure last time out,
> best of last 2, average of last 2 etc....
>

[horsegoer]

How you can get a good idea on which product is better is to look at them race by race and see a sheet for a particular horse and say well on thoro this horse is backward moving and on the sheets he is forward moving and see hoe he runs. or he is off a top on one sheet and looks , to most sheet readers, like he should regress but on the other the pattern is entirely different...more positive, and see hoe he runs. I am should there are major differences in the patterns of some horse between the two products. And, for the most part, there is general agreement between most sheet readers about a pattern of a horse and whether it is postive, negative or nuetral.

CTC,

If you are trying to get at who is producing the most accurate figures, you have to remove the handicapping skill from the results and it has to be an apples to apples comparison.

You can\'t isolate the quality of the figures using handicappers that might have different skill levels. I could probably get better results than my grandmother using raw final times no matter what set of figures you gave her.  

You can\'t compare speed figures with weight and ground loss to those without because you can\'t tell if the different results are because of the quality of the figures or the incremental information included in one set vs. the other.

To determine if incremental information is better you have to compare the results using the same set of figures with and without the incremental information.

[jimbo66]

Class,

Put me down for a thousand on your grandmother........

She likes Zito\'s horse in the 2nd at Saratoga. She just called me. She\'s looking for a big forward move.  

She likes Zito again in the 6th for the same reason, but I think she\'s steaming a little because she in the hole for the day.

[TGJB]

Okay, here we go again. Len has this time not just taken a shot at me, but at a customer of mine. Again, Jimbo can handle it, but I\'m going to make a couple of points:

1-- \"I\'ve generally been pretty good at ignoring the lies about the SHEETS and myself that appear regularly elsewhere...\"

Len, don\'t hold back. Please do everybody a favor, and respond directly to my \"lies\" next time. For once. You can even do it here.


2-- Not that it matters, but Jimbo\'s comments characterized your comments, not you. See above for what he actually said, and context. Some of that context is that this started with Jimbo politely proposing that Ragozin guys join him in an objective test of both data services. Readers can draw their own conclusions as to why that struck a nerve.


3-- Oh, Len. I don\'t know whether you give the data to Frankel for free, but I doubt it. I think you give it to him and others for very little, which has the same effect. In fact, I have asked you publicly to tell us your rates for horsemen a couple of times, so the public can have some context in comparing the policies of the two companies. Since you are OUTRAGED at Jimbo\'s suggestion, how about clearing things up once and for all? I went through the math once on this site, and I think it worked out that even if I gave Frankel a 50% discount for bulk, I would charge him something like 250k a year. What do you charge him? What does he get?


4-- We have a conundrum. You say you don\'t give your data to any media/track employee for free in exchange for any testimonials. Yet Harvey Pack has gone on record publicly many times saying he gets your data for free, and he not only pushed your data and ripped TG while wearing a NYRA jacket at the \"Paddock Club\" a few dozen times (he used to call us the \"cheap sheets\", until I called the NYRA head of marketing and put a stop to it), he also quoted your figures and barred anyone from saying \"Thoro-Graph\" on the NYRA replay show for years, and made them re-tape a segment when Phil Johnson quoted one of our figures.

Was Harvey lying? Does he pay for your sheets?


5-- \"I\'ve posted this here where it can\'t be directly replied to as there is nothing here that needs any comment or debate pro or con...\"

Of course that\'s why you did it.

[jimbo66]

Jerry,

Where is the message that you are responding to?  I don\'t see it on the \"other board\".

[TGJB]

Under \"Len Friedman says\". They gave it it\'s own section so it could not be replied to, because it does not rate a reply. You\'ll probably disagree.

Try not to burst a blood vessel. I\'m about running out of them, myself, although some were from laughing.

[richiebee]

I can\'t believe the shiny- headed stooge took a shot at the TG product. HIS schtick was tired 15 years ago.

Just a question for Bill Spillane or TGJB. Is there any track or simulcast facility where one product or the other (Rags or TGs) has exclusive distribution rights? Where one is sold and not the other?

[TGJB]

There have been some over the years. Garden State wouldn\'t let us in when a certain individual was calling the shot, giving Ragozin an exclusive. Ragozin doesn\'t sell at the OTB teletheaters, I don\'t know whether they want to or not.
A certain Raggie got a job at Calder and tried to get us tossed last year, but I called Ken Dunn and got it straightened out. There could be others, I would have to think about it. But at this point all the action is here on the web, so it doesn\'t matter that much.

[miff]

Harvey\'s OK.Why he plugs RAGS, I don\'t know but Jan Rushton frequently references TG figs in her pre race analysis.

[TGJB]

Jan gets free data from us, and when we do it, with her and others, we demand no quid pro quo-- we assume that if people are using it they think it has value, and will eventually say so.

 I didn\'t have a problem with Harvey saying he liked Ragozin, I had a problem with the way he treated us, and those guests who used our data. It was particularly annoying because NYRA didn\'t (and I believe still does not) make a dime on Ragozin sales, which are from a privately owned stand, while we sell from a NYRA stand, which made Harvey\'s acts something of a conflict of interest.

My problem with what Ragozin does with horsemen (give them bulk data dirt cheap, like DRF customer service) is that it accomplishes it\'s intent-- which, as Jimbo says, is marketing. They do not have any kind of serious record with horsemen, unlike us. But by charging (literally) less than 5% of what we do, they are able to get horsemen using their product, and talking about it. Ragozin figures have all the exclusivity of Beyers, with horsemen.

[jimbo66]

I can\'t even get mad.  I certainly didn\'t call him stupid or dumb.  It has been a number of years since namecalling was \"in\".  About 3rd grade, from what I remember.

His comments on his board were dumb and disingenuous.  As anybody that runs any kind of business will tell you, every business has competitors and marketing is part of any business model.  Even us \"dumb gamblers\" realize that.  For Len to say he has no competitors, doesn\'t market, doesn\'t need to market, etc.etc. was just a sermon on the mount to appear \"above it all\" for his customer base.  I am sure he has a customer base that is smart enough to see through that kind of BS, but none of them apparently post on his board.  

He was very very quick to react negatively to my post regarding a study of the products.  As most objective people know, there is no way to predict what would have happened in that study.  I am sure that Jerry is confident his product is better and the guys over there should feel confident that theirs is better.  But Len\'s reaction to the study, as well as his lack of reaction to various handicapping contests, is a telling sign.  

Interesting how he tried to make the study that I proposed into an issue about paying for his product.  What the heck is that all about?  Having a daily user of his product work with me (a daily user of the Tgraph product), and compare the numbers to see which numbers hold up better was a proposal to compare the figures.  Not some longwinded scheme for me to avoid paying $25 for his product or for the RAgs user to avoid the $25 for the Tgraph product.  How stupid is that?

For the record, it is very clear in the study that Len sent me (12 years old) that the figures from all providers in the study were given free of charge.  Not that I was asking for that, but I just want to point out how he tried to create some type of octopus ink cloud to avoid the real topics.

[miff]

TGJB,

There is nothing wrong with Jan getting free data and referencing it on the air.Don\'t know if you and Old Harvey have back history but he did say on the DRF seminar show that Len and Andy belong in the Racing Hall Of Fame as the Fathers of Speed Figures.

[TGJB]

Miff- Don\'t get me started.

 Anyway, if you saw the speed figure panel, you saw the Donaldson book from the 1930s. If not, check out \"History lesson\" in the archives here.