Rick B. Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Just looked -- trying to beat the legit fave
> again?
>
> You guys in the TG laboratory are committed, I\'ll
> give you that.
>
> If anybody is going to beat Halo Dolly, it will
> be somebody ridiculous, like Royal Empress or
> Appealing.
Dear Sir,
I would like to come to TG\'s defense here.
First, I agree with you and have publicly on this board that it does not make sense to always try to beat legitimate favorites (see
https://www.thorograph.com/phorum/read.php?1,81403,81413#msg-81413).
Second, I do not want to be accused of redboarding, so let us assume that Halo Dolly actually won the ROTW. It is not important whether she won or lost for the analysis and I do not want to get sidetracked by irrelevant details.
Third, The issue is the legitimacy of Halo Dolly\'s favoritism. In the example, where I publicly agreed with you, you could take the names off the sheets and no matter how many times you shook up the sheets, everybody would agree which horse should be and would be the favorite in the race. If you took the names off the sheet for the Halo Dolly ROTW, I strongly suspect that no horse would be viewed as likely being an 9-5 favorite....and most likely the horse that went off second choice would have been viewed as the favorite with a mess of horses at middling prices.
It is the rationale for this third point that makes this ROTW very sound. I handicapped that card with a group of friends and was the only sheet user. They all said how can Halo Dolly not win this race; she is 4 for 5 on the DMR turf and there is nobody special in this race. I pointed out that the 4 for 5 is not nearly as gaudy as it appears when you look at the sheet. First, she never made a new top on the DMR turf (something you would expect for a horse for a course) and, second, she only runs a top about twice a year and the her usual effort plus the weight made her no different than a bunch of others in the race and slower than one or two. It is situations like this where the sheets give a player an edge over form handicappers. Things like winning streaks take on mythical proportions when seen on the form (noise, really), but they can be anomalies when compared to the sheet (signal?). Halo Dolly was a very good example of that. The 4 for 5 on the DMR turf was just a small sample size variation, yet a lot of people pounded her on that basis, and a sheet reader could know it was not as gaudy as it looked. Another factor here is the weight. Sheet players pay a lot of attention to weight. Most form handicappers do not. The differences between competitors a lot of times (and in this race particularly) is not so great that 5 pound weight differences can be ignored. In this race, the weight discrepancies were quite significant when evaluating Halo Dolly.
It is races like this that give people an opportunity to glimpse the advantage sheet analysis has over form analysis. Let us assume Halo Dolly won. That will still happen plenty of times under the analysis. That doesnt make playing against her insane; what is important is that relevant factors are properly weighed. By the way, I do not think that people should only use the sheets. I think it is important that all information be taken into consideration and then the trick is sorting between the signal and the noise and weighting the signals and de-emphasizing the noise.
I would note, it is still in the redboard room, but I handicapped the closing day card at Del Mar with the same people. There was a horse they loved that was 3-1 ML Favorite (went off 7-2, second choice). The horse was 2 for 2 and they loved that....he just wins and wins.....on the sheets, he was about the 8th or 9th fastest horse with a very ugly pattern. I insisted the horse was a toss....coming off the Halo Dolly arguments, they deferred to me and I was right (doesn\'t mean we hit the race, just correctly through out a ML Fav). That horse was named Magic Channel in the sixth (del mar, Sept 4). The point is that people can easily be distracted from what is really going on by things like winning streaks which are not terribly relevant for the analysis.
All of this being said, there are plenty of times where the favorite is just stone cold legitimate and trying to beat it is a recipe for the poor house. You just have to make sure you are not reacting automatically in either direction.
