Non winner of 2 lifetime races

[Bill Lyster]

A couple of years ago I was working with another contributor to this site who was trying to teach me the matchup. Thats another story. Anyway, in some of the races we did I kept noticing that the horse in the field with the highest class of win often was the winner of the race!

I started handicapping races solely using the Match Up in about October of last year. I would print the free PPS and work the races with a hard copy of the form in front of me.

Since October at venues that included Del Mar, SA, Woodbine, FG, GP, Keeneland, Churchill Downs, Arlington and a few others I found 25 races that I had handicapped that were restricted to NW2L at any class level. I assure you that there are a lot more of these races than I discovered, but I did not handicap that often. If you look through the entries for this last weekend you will find 5 or 6 races per day of this category.

I used only basic contender guidelines and minimal matching techniques to get 17 winners. (In one of the races from Woodbine, all of the horses had won their maiden in statebred MSW races - I counted this as a loss.) I identified running styles and only eliminated horses that were otherwise contenders only if there were multiple early horses that canceled out one of the highest level winning maidens.

The highest class is MSW, then MSW-statebred (I considered a statebred MSE as a 50k MCL and I cut in half any MCL race restricted to statebreds. So a statebred MCL25 was recorded as a MCL12.5. Maiden races won on turf where today was on dirt, were not considered and vice versa. If a horse has so many races that its maiden win is not in the last 10 races, the horse was basically NQ

If a horse did not meet the contender guidelines shown here, I labeled the horse NQ (not qualified) and went on to the next best maiden win level.

Recent races:
5/23 -WO 4th, there were 2 MSW winners, the 2 and 9, of the rest there were 2 statebreds and rest were MCL of some level. The 9 won at about 5/1

5/24 - SA 5th, the 2 won at MCL50, the highest by far, won at 5.0/1

5/25 - Arl, 1st, the 3 was tied for 2nd hi, won at dbl digit odds.

5/25 - CD, 3rd, six horses, 1 mdn win on turf-today was mud; the two highest finished 1-2; winner pd over 3/1

5/25 - SA, 7th, the 10 and 12 were MCL50 mdn winners with all but 1 other from MCL 30 and lower; 1 horse MSW at GGF, but was NQ. the 10 won at 9/2, the 12 was 3rd.

I lost 1 of these types of races today and 2 yesterday (not shown).

Still testing this and I would be interested in the results of others.

I have about 15 races for NW3L in that same period, but no patterns have appeared or at least I have not seen the pattern yet. Problem with a lot of these races is that many times you cannot see the maiden win and sometimes even the N2L win in the last 10 races!!!


Here are the contender guidelines: (most of these guidelines were originally from Tom Brohamer - there is a slight change of what is up close for longer races. Note: if the last race was the first race at today's track and it makes the horse NQ, go to next race without penalizing the horse.)