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There are so many things about RDSS that I only learn about when I post here on this forum. This forum is one of the best things on the internet. I wish I had posted here about this, but at the time, I thought it was a problem with Trackmaster. When I asked Trackmaster how to access the file, they acted like I was a pirate and the customer service guy was very rude. I should probably have come to you at that point, but in the email, the Trackmaster guy implied that it was your doing and that I was some kind of cretin for wanting to access the Trackmaster data that I had purchased.
This gave me a very bad impression of Trackmaster and really left me with zero desire to ever do business with them again, except thru RDSS. I have had very good luck and have been treated very respectfully by both Equibase and Brisnet. Maybe this guy at Trackmaster was just having a bad day, maybe he was douche and they fired him, who knows, but I was very unhappy with what he implied and I am no fan of Trackmaster after that interaction.
It is no surprise that RDSS has some feature that is very useful that I did not know about before tonight. The more I use RDSS and the more I find out about its many capabilities, the happier I am to support the software with my business. I loved using the Speculator files to test my dad's angles when he was still alive. I think I had well over a thousand races at our favorite tracks that I would run angles against, and as I am sure anyone who has tested published angles on a large set of races knows, none of them turned out to be profitable by themselves. I remember one angle, a bid and fallback and bid again, turned out to be decent when some other factors were present, and many were like this, but it was always fun to run the numbers and then look at the cases that showed a profit and see if there mitigating factors or things to combine to try and learn something.
Howard was never really able to quantify a class rating. Everyone knows that high class horses run just fast enough to win, so it is hard to tell if they were really pushing or just coasting, or what. I think the cleverest class angle Howard ever told me was to use the horse's second best race. I know at one time there were guys using the second best race combined with the best of the last two races to try to get a combination form and ability line that Howard said showed some promise in some situations. I do wonder whether there is some combination of previous races won and itm combined with maybe earnings over the previous 12 months or some other time period that might at least give some kind of a class factor. My biggest concern is that a smart trainer will place the horse appropriately and so the "class" will show higher because of higher earnings for the trainers that are smart enough to find the right spot for a horse.
Anyway, thank you Ted for letting me know about this export feature, I will definitely look at it. Is there somewhere it is documented? Like what track to track adjustment, or DTV adjustment, or surface adjustments are in the data or is it all raw data? Are the times in 1/100ths, or in 1/5ths? All of this would be useful to know.
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