Okay, One More Pop Quiz

[JAKE]

I must be dense.

The gusting wind race was the Sport Page, not the Cigar Mile.  No?

Yes, a gusting wind makes a difference of a couple of points..that\'s why
Lion Tamer\'s number in the Sports Page is better than his number in the Cigar Mile.

[TGJB]

Jake-- You are correct, I read you as saying it was in the Cigar. But it plays the same either way-- it is affecting the numbers of all the horses in the race, or none of them. Wind and any number of other things can affect the raw time of the race, but you factor them into the numbers you end up assigning the horses. If that were not true, there would be no point in using wind corrections at all. We are in theory adjusting for all these things.

In simplest terms-- if you end up with a race (or a couple of them, as happened 7/27 at Saratoga) where all the horses would get numbers much worse or much better than they have been running if you tie it to other races, something is wrong. And it doesn\'t make a difference whether there is wind or not.

By only looking at Lion Tamer you can\'t see that-- you would have to see sheets on the other horses. Or, you could just realize that it would be silly to think that if LT ran back to his Sport Page-- where he lost to Mass Media by 3 1/2 lengths-- he would have beat Badge of Silver, Pico Central etc.in the Cigar by 6 lengths. That sound reasonable to you? Think Mass Media could have beat that field by 10?

You are Unfinished Symph from the other board, no?

[gatodelsol]

so what you are saying is that it is impossible for all or most of the horses in a race to run slower than they are projected to run?  

[mandown]

gato,

Think about it - if there are six horses in a race and each has a 50% chance to run worse (not slower, time is relative to the track condition) then the probability of all of them running worse is .5*.5*.5*.5*.5*.5 is .016 or 1.6%.

True, that\'s not impossible but it is extremely unlikely - and that\'s just with six horses. And 50% is a high figure for the likelihood of a bad run, especially for good-class horses. If that figure were the norm there\'d be no point in handicapping would there? You\'d do just as well with a pin!

George

I think the probability of 2-3 contenders getting impacted significantly by a very fast pace, a couple that raced just off it being somewhat impacted, and another couple going off form is not that low once you islolate the races with extreme paces properly. Breaking races like that out has the effect of building the impact of pace into the track variant.