How many horse races are run in US + Canada every year?

[Furious Pete]

How many speed figures are Thoro-Graph making per year? It must be alot!!

[RICH]

42,500 give or take

[miff]

Rich

If that is correct and field size averages only 7, then TG makes like 297k speed figures?...that\'s a whole lotta X\'s.

Mike

[Furious Pete]

That\'s impressive.

And then you have all the foreign runners shipping in.

[RICH]

it does count every meet , even the fair types

[TGJB]

It\'s true of everyone who makes and sells figures.

And reading that made me very tired. I do about 8 tracks myself, depending on time of year.

[Furious Pete]

You should feel proud as well as tired Jerry!

So it\'s close to 1000 figures a day, that\'s a lot, and you do 8 tracks yourself, mostly main tracks I presume? I would be very interested in knowing if there are differences between how you make them i.e if you rely more on the \"pure projection\" output you get from the machine on the smaller tracks (like Mountaineer, Penn, Charles Town, Delta Downs, Turfway Park, Finger Lakes) than you do on the \"big tracks\" with lots of customers like Belmont, Saratoga, Keeneland, Gulfstream, Churchill, Santa Anita, Del Mar etc? Do these big tracks get any extra care at all (except that you\'re doing them yourself)?

[TGJB]

I don\'t know what that pure projection by the machine thing is, every figure has human judgment involved. We have live ground for 20 circuits, for the smaller ones we have a computer model that breaks down where they are at the points of call and projects, then someone compares the results to chart comments (which can be misleading), so those have more room for error.

The way it works now, after looking at the whole race I just make one correction for each race, the computer applies it to all the runners. Back when the sheets were handwritten I had to figure out what each horse should get in my head and write it down, a real pain in the ass and hugely time consuming. The first few years I was doing 12-13 tracks myself.