Claiming Horses - Trainers

[DaveEdwards]

I've been snowed in this last couple of days (probably nothing like Ted has to face in Canada I know!). I've had the opportunity to spend some time listening to the Brohamer Lecture Tapes.

Key points being the importance of keeping a track profile and the negative class dropper as ways of identifying horses that wouldn't be contenders.

I thought it might be useful to collate the data on what amount horses were actually being claimed for in a simple spreadsheet to help me get an idea about how negative a drop actually was. As I was starting to think about this it then occurred to me that I'd be in a position to then identify the relative strengths & weaknesses of trainers as they operated with claimers. Tom has made reference to knowing who the good and bad trainers are on your circuit. I know you can see what a horse has raced at previously in RDSS, but I thought it may give me a greater understanding of this area to do a little more digging.

My rationale here isn't really to go down the trainer angle route. It really is just to help identify non-contenders. Clearly some trainers are going to be much better at preparing the "non contender" than others so-to-speak.

Before I start this process my initial ideas were looking at:

• Who is good at claiming horses, measured by how well they run next time out.
• Who is bad at claiming horses, measured as above.
• Who is good at offloading horses what are going bad and how much do they reduce a horse's value by in order to tempt a buyer? Measured by how badly the claimed horses run in future, lay-off time and the size of the claiming level drop.
• Who thinks they can claim an injured/cheap horse and turn it around?
• Who just claims cheap horses and has no idea?

The tracks I'm going to concentrate on are Parx and Penn. Further to this I'm downloading the pdfs from FL for last year too.

My question to the forum is basically, am I on the right lines here or have I missed anything out? Any ideas on this gratefully received. To be honest, I have no preconceptions about the trainer claiming issue. I've never read anything on this area and am aiming to keep my analysis as much within the Methodology as possible. Also, is this a worthwhile study or do you think it might be a waste of time in terms if effort v. potential reward?

Thank you for reading! Hope the new year is treating everyone well.