Quote:
Originally Posted by shoeless
FTL
Don't know if putting this question the right way but when picking
contenders how much emphasis do you put on class
For an example today in the 3rd at Parx it was an 8000 open
claimer race. The 4 horse had a impressive win by 3.75 lengths
but it was for 5000n1y and was just claimed out of that race.
Would you have included this horse in the contender mix? I
don't have the PP'S to put up or would have
I missed the winner by including this horse
Jeff
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Shoeless,
The short answer is A LOT, when necessary.
I don’t have the PP’s for that race either, so I will answer your question based on the information you provided and “general” thoughts.
If you have been following along, you know the first thing I do is throw out horses with very little chance of winning, such as horses with a ML 20/1 and greater and horses off more than 90 days. Then I look for lines for the remaining horses based on the guidelines I have set forth many times. Those without a qualifying line are also thrown out. At this point, all horses that are left go into the “contender” column (so to speak). If you have noticed, most players have 5 contenders. I “might” have 5 and I “might not” have 5. There are as many as are left. (more on this later) Now, my observation is that most players consider any of their contenders to be possible winners of the race. I don’t! For that reason they are willing to bet any of them to win based on odds. I don’t! At this point all you have is some horses with lines. The next step is to enter your contenders into the program. Now you can begin to evaluate your contenders.
You said the horse you are asking about was coming off an “impressive” win. How impressive was it? I don’t mean, how fast did it run? And I don’t mean, how many lengths did it win by? The important thing you mentioned was that it beat “NON WINNERS OF A RACE IN A YEAR” for a claiming price of $5,000. Think about that. Not one horse in that race had won a race in a year, including the winner. NOT ONE! I mean, how tough of a field was that? I’d say pretty darn weak. The other information you provided was that today the race is an OPEN race for a claiming price of $8,000. So exactly what is an OPEN race? Horses in an OPEN race could have won 5 races in the last year. They could have won 10 races in the last year. I’m sure you get the point. Do you REALLY THINK that horse that just beat NW1Y for $5,000 is going to come right back and beat OPEN horses for $8,000?? Regardless of what its’ rankings might be...I DON’T!!
Like I said at the beginning, I don’t have the PP’s for the race and therefore I have no idea what the rest of the field looked like, so I just answered based on the information you provided and “general” thoughts.
Ok, back to the number of contenders. Since Tom Brohamer is the father of modeling, I’m going to take his advice. He once wrote that in order to enter a race into your model, you should have at least 5 contenders. You can’t “force” contenders. You have what you have and that’s all that you have. So, suppose you only have 3 contenders and the best “sustained” horse wins. Later on when you look at that race in your model, it will chow the horse 3rd early and 1st sustained. Well, how far back was the horse? The model says 3rd, but maybe it was further back than that. Because you only have 3 contenders in the model it’s hard to tell. If there were 5 (or more) contenders and the horse was ranked 5th early and 1st for sustained, now you have a better picture of how the horse measured up to the rest of the field that day. So, Brohamer's advice was, if you only have 3 contenders, cash your tickets, don’t enter the race into you model and move on to the next race. Only add a race to your model if there was 5 or more contenders. His advice always made sense to me!