[Because I Can Jim]

Hi Ted,

I've read the CSR release notes posting.

I have a question in the back of my mind which is that the note states the last four usable lines.

To clarify my understanding, if the horse has 10 lines showing and the first and fourth do not have usable information (due to it was foggy, or one of the tracks doesn't record fractional times) then the calculation is made from the second, third, fifth and sixth lines. Is that correct?

I have been doing some testing myself in the similiar vein that Richard Mathie (rmath) has been doing. Dick (kahunab) always said that from his records the winner was in the top 5 CSR 90% of the time. It frustrated me because I would not get close to those figures. In speaking with Richard (rmath) about his settings on the configure tab, my percentages went up a bit, but, not close to the percentages both Dick and Richard are getting.

I decided to do some "research".

Following Richard's guidelines, I set my configure tab to Use 100% of DTV - Default Mode and +/-20 range of min/max DTV. I also followed his other guidelines for selecting races to use, pacelines to select, etc...

For 100 races (I know that the population could/should be much higher, but, I am looking for an indication and not representative figures) from 11/01/13 to 11/03/13, I had the winner in my top 5 CSR only 75% of the time from all of the tracks available for that period. Hmmm....

Now I changed only one variable - from Default mode to Val4 Emulation mode.

Granted, I've only worked 34 more races (definitely hardly a indicative figure, but....) and my winner in the top 5 CSR percentage has jumped up to 82%. This was encouraging because when I have a population of 100 races, I think I will be around the same percentage. If I am right..."if"... I will bump up the +/-20 range to 50 and see what happens. I have an inkling it should increrase the percentage up a bit more. Hopefully, my percentage will be where I think it should be.

I've taken a little detour from my original question with the purpose of stating that to get the optimal use of CSR, settings on the Config tab may need to be changed for those who are interested.

Back to the original question, by understanding the last four usable as to how it figures in the calculation may possibly allow me to include a race into my research rather than tossing out the race because I am not sure if the CSR for that horse is truly representative of that particular horse. Including a race or not including it is not going to change the data sample. What it will do is to ease my mind a bit for when I do toss a race instead of wondering if I am making the right call "at that moment".

Thanks for you input,
Jim