The Factor

[TGJB]

Those guys make very good European figures, though they have problems with certain things I won\'t go into. Their American figures aren\'t nearly as accurate, just ballpark.

[P.Eckhart]

TGJB Wrote:
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> Those guys make very good European figures, though
> they have problems with certain things I won\'t go
> into. Their American figures aren\'t nearly as
> accurate, just ballpark.


Personally, I don\'t use them, I make my own, always have done.
I do know that they they have recently finished the first phase
of doing US numbers comprehensively. i.e. not just stakes level
but all levels at (nearly) every track. They are now owned by
betfair so it makes sense to provide data for that market should
it ever take off. (You yourself had a generous protracted free
data deal with them a while back.) The methodology behind it is
not speed (timefigures) which could never provide a complete
database for pace reasons. Neither is it yardstick handicapping
whereby you consider all horses toward the objective of finding
the animal(s) that \"ran it\'s race\" and basing everyting around
that. They use race standardisation. Here are some taster about
this methodology by the guy responsible for building Timeforms
new north american dbase.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

[miff]

Once you get through reading all the sites/boards regarding figure making theories/handicapping etc it becomes very easy to understand why horse bookmakers get rich.

My personal favorites are the theories about weight.Considering there is no way to quantify the ability of each animal to shoulder weight, where do all of these inane theories come from? Watched horses, back when, pick up more and more weight and still beat there regular competition by the same or greater margins.

Mike

[TGJB]

I took a quick look. He\'s using a version of pars, though he\'s smart enough not to just use winners. The problem is that pars (averages) give you limited accuracy compared to the projection method, and also can\'t be used to compare horses from different years or generations-- if you always bring the group to par as a whole, you have no way of knowing whether the group is getting faster or slower.

What he\'s doing works okay over there for day to day use, because most races are on grass, and grass horses are much more consistent than dirt horses, meaning figures fall in a tight range for each horse. If he keeps it up and refines his U.S. base over five years or so he will have figures a couple of levels below Beyer\'s, probably at the level of the computer generated ones sold by some services here, which work on a similar principle. The amount of work and information (let alone expertise) required to create accurate figures for U.S. races is way beyond what he\'s talking about, especially since dirt and American synthetic surfaces change speed much more than grass courses.

[miff]

\"Beyer paired the Factor at 103. RAGS had him 5 in his previous, don\'t yet know what they gave him yesterday\"

JB,

Update,hear Rags paired The Factor at 5 in the Rebel. So, Beyer and Rags have Factors last 2 efforts as pairs(beyer a little faster pair than Rags pair)

TG will most likely show Factor moving forward several points off his previous 4 ,so for those who use both services and live and die with pattern reads, it gets tricky.

Also,if you have not yet looked, wait until you see Uncle Mo\'s conversion TG/Beyer/Rags, you also somewhat disagree with both of them on MO\'s entire career.


Mike

[TGJB]

In other words Ragozin did as I predicted with TF. Both of them have him not returning to his top in that last one.

As for Uncle Mo, I know about the differences. In the case of the BC figure, I discussed what I did and why at the time. And in looking at what the horses in that race have done since, there is absolutely no reason to think I got it wrong, and one very good reason to think I got it right-- Rogue Romance, who exactly paired his BC top in his only start this year.

Take a look in the Archives and see how that race looks if you take off a couple of points. And keep in mind the dead rail when you do (which Ragozin does not take into acount).

Now that SA is back to dirt, we\'ll start getting an apples-to-apples line on everyone\'s figures when they ship east (which we used to be able to do, and I used to do a whole rundown every year about some of the really silly stuff Ragozin had on his BC sheets). Ragozin ONE TURN SA figures will be 2-3 points fast, as they have been for years.

[Flighted Iron]

For Derby betting purposes, this was the result I wanted - a short odds horse with lots of speed that likely can\'t make the distance, and puts lots of pressure on Mo/THAS/Soldat.

Hopefully he gets another 1w/1w and wins by 2. No value at CD and with luck he may
not have better than 3w/3w.