Track to Track Adjustments

[Mark]

Configuration:

[Mark]

[Mark]

In the 5th race I have pacelines from SA turf, GG Turf SA Dirt, and GG Poly. I took the #9's dirt line because he was a P7 and the only horse that had wired his field and while these horses rarely win, they will go to the lead and set the early pace. Now it is up to you to figure out how I got my lines but you can see that my 2nd ranked horse #4 is 20/1 on the morning line. You can also see that the #6 that I didn't even include in my contenders was the best opposite energy horse by final beaten lengths. But I am a lousy exotics player so primarily stick to win/place.

Note that it is very confidence building to see your place and show horses highly rated. If you just get a big price horse on top, that is great but shouldn't a valid handicapping method get to top finishers in the top rankings?

The 7th was tough for me and I would have lost this race. Most likely I would have bet the #11 to win and place. Well, he finished 3rd at 42/1. What made it hard was that the winner only had one turf line. But he was at the very peak of his game, setting a new top according to the speed figures in his last race on POLY. I will use POLY when I don't have a Turf line and probably should have used one of his recent POLY lines. This horse just ran off. He had 4 lengths on the field at the 8th pole and needed every one to win over the hard charging favorite.
Why use the 10th line on the 11? He had run 3 very good races in Open Allowance, purse $27 before something took him to the farm. Delia has been training since I was a boy. Look at the 3 works: 3f, 36.8, 4f, 48.4 and 5f, 101.2. Horses are trained to 24 second quarter miles or 12 second furlongs. This is beautiful. Watch out for this guy next time, but you won't get 42/1 on him.
The 9th had two keys: The #10 horse was returning after 261 days. Eddie Truman must be in his 80s. Nice works but this guy either needs 9f or a pistol hot early pace. I made the decision to toss him. The other was the sprinter stretching out. I used the #4's 4th line as my projected pace. I used it instead of the 3rd because it was slightly faster early. So in essence you are taking out the E and EPs. Those were my eliminations. the 4th I though was good enough to hang on for a piece, he ran 4th, that is why I don't be exactas. Look at the winner closely. He is not a dirt horse. When TuP closed last spring he went to EMD, Larry Ross is headquarters up there but there is an established circuit EMD - GG - TuP that they follow as the season's change. Some go from TuP to Canterbury. This guy goes to EMD for the summer. After time away, 3rd race off a 174 day layoff sprint -route -turf route. He is much better on POLY as most Turf horses are. Nice POWER MOVE going to the stretch call in his last. This is a logical placement for this horse.
Nowhere in this did I mention Daily Track Variants. i let the program make the distance equalizations and apply the Track to Track adjustments. If you get all concerned about these adjustments it will undermine your belief in what you are seeing in your read outs. Review the pp from the bottom up, don't focus exclusively on the last 3 or 4 lines. Yes it is important the the horse shows something in his recent races but when there is a valid reason for some poor form, like a layoff or wrong surface, distance, too high class or even outside post don't get stuck on that. What has the horse been able to compete against successfully, what is he competing against today? Now answer your 3 questions.

[The Pook]

Mark

Does it really make a difference if you use or don't use DTV or anywhere in between? As long as you're consistent it shouldn't matter as far as matching goes. And as I recall from what Jim said looking at the PP's from the bottom up, it is to try and get people to look at the entire picture of the horse and away from "last three only..itis".

Your matching above is well done. It is interesting how the two approaches on this site Sartin/Bradshaw are almost polar opposites.
Adjustments/Raw
Best of last 3/All the PP's
Corollaries,Track Profiles/Todays Matchup only.
Fulcrum Pace/Projected Pace etc.
and yet both are pace based and still tie together.

Bradshaw learned to win from Sartin and yet went on to create his own subset. I do them both and find that Bradshaws Matchup lends itself more easily to creativity. In that respect I find it more satisfying. I switch them from time to time to keep things interesting because I find one way all the time can become tedious. I have perfected neither but Matching as you've shown above is what I truly love to do. Just have to get my ROI a little higher and improve my mental ability to handle losing streaks. Like FTL's tagline says "If it was easy everybody would do it". It must be confusing for anyone new to this to decide what approach or hybrid thereof to utilize. For sure it will take time.

Continued good skills,
Pook

[Mark]

Pook,
I think people misunderstand this idea of consistency. If all inputs were consistent then applying a consistent mathematical process to them would be consistent. But we are handed inputs with both positive and negative values and then attempt to apply a variant application process to it but the result can be in the opposite direction in the extreme. The Absolute value is the same but what gets applied when velocity is adjusted can have the opposite effect. There is an additional problem which I have addressed to Ted but he is silenced on the matter by an agreement with Trackmaster prohibiting him from divulging the proprietary information. However, what I have been able to confirm is that when applying both DTV and ITV you can, operational word can, get double counting. I have farted around with these different configurations for 2 years now and by far the best results come from only applying the ITV. Again I work mostly turf races.
Speaking frankly, and I do not wish to offend anyone nor the spirit of Howard Sartin, as he was always very gracious with his time and attention with me, and I will say I have mostly read everything put out by O'Henry House, Sartin Methodology, as well as Jim Bradshaw, I think Howard's goal was to save addicted gamblers starting with his initial group of Truck drivers. He provided the infrastructure and methodology for the whole Pace Movement. No question he was a brilliant man with tremendous energy and a sincere desire to help people. But he also was a bit of a showman and promoter. Jim Bradshaw was a natural genius with powers of memory and mathematical skills I find astounding. Almost Savant like! The methodology completely changed with the release of Energy/Thoromation. Manually charting paceline velocities introduced Acceleration and Deceleration which require Calculus to derive in computer code. That was Bradshaw.
Jim's thesis is that you must find out the fastest early pace a horse has ever competed against successfully: POWER LINE. Concept: the true measure of a Thoroughbred race horse is speed and the ability to carry that speed over a distance of ground. Once you know this in a field of horses, you know who the best horse was at one time. Now the problem is to determine if the horse can reproduce that effort today or if wear and tear, fatigue, mishandling and such have caused the horse to deteriorate. And how the various energy distribution patterns within the race mix allowing one to prevail. His 3 questions were distilled from handicapping 10s of 1000s of races manually from the racing form. 1) Is he still a horse? 2) Has he changed his running style and become a slow horse 3. If an Early horse, can he still get on top of his fractions? I have pondered these questions for the last couple of years looking for some kind of hidden meaning or interpretation and realized that he meant what he said literally.

It really comes down to this in my view. I trained and managed 100s of sales people in my formal career. In a nutshell, there are two types of people, 1. Those that are security motivated and 2. those that are incentive motivated. The former group wants to be guided by strong core of fairly black and white information that they can follow. The latter is much more likely to operate in an open environment developing the useful knowledge based upon their success or failure. Neither is bad, they are just preferences.

With the Match Up you have to develop confidence in your ability to predict who will take the lead and thereby project an early pace. This is a very tough thing for a new handicapper to do and maybe why the failure rate is so much greater than a more conventional somewhat rule bound philosophy.

That's my two cents...

[Bill V.]

hi Mark

Pook wrote

Mark

Does it really make a difference if you use or don't use DTV or anywhere in between? As long as you're consistent it shouldn't matter as far as matching goes. And as I recall from what Jim said looking at the PP's from the bottom up, it is to try and get people to look at the entire picture of the horse and away from "last three only..itis".

I agree with Mr Pook
I think people will have the same success using your settings or the settings
Doc left us and validator mode or Ted's ideas of settings
I feel its not really the adjustments, they will take care of themselfs over the long run

Just for kicks using val mode and 50 percent DTV and using the ITV
I just entered the highest TPR for every horse as long as it was a route line
If the high TPR was tied or very close I took the one at the closer distance and turf over poly but I used poly and turf lines for this

I just did race 9
Horse 11 is right up top, a 2 horse better could land here for sure based on the odds

My settings
Best TPR comparable looking at all lines

[Bill V.]

For this one I used Marks same pace lines
but my "Doc" settings = full ITV and 50% DTV and Val mode

Again the winner # 4 is ranked third so a 2 horse win better could get this one

[Bill V.]

For race 7 I used both Marks lines andthen I did the race using just the highest TPR at a comparable distance , using poly and turf lines But I used "Doc's"
settings

Marks Lines The winner # 8 is low



High TPR did better here The 8 is closer to the top

[Mark]

Bill,

I have done extensive studies on long meets using both TPR and Total Energy and have found that using this method immediately eliminates 25 -30% of the winners, normal the higher paying horses. I just can't reconcile that. I don't want to bet into the toteboard. I rarely bet a horse less than 6/1 to win, 8/1 I bet win and place. That is how I avoid betting two horses.
Additionally, you want to have confidence in the various readouts that RDSS2 does such a great job of producing. I have grown to love the Segments screen since I have confidence that the numbers in the F1, SC and FIN column are meaningful and I never had that before with all the various configuration setups and mucking around with various paceline selection concepts. The 7th race was difficult for the general betting public because they don't think horses can go gate to wire at 9f on the turf. That's why this horse went off at 6.8/1. now look at the readout:

In the F1 column off the only turf line for the #8, he is 2.2 lengths behind the #2. Hey, the #2 is a SP, by definition they lay behind the Pressers between 3 and 5 lengths off at the 1st call. He's not going to be in the lead. The other E is way back 12.4 lengths off the lead he will try to run with the #8 but that will just kill him off. The EP is also well back. Both these horses are out of position and will not run a best effort. So we are looking at an open lead for the #8 of probably 3 lengths and if he runs 3 lengths slower and conserves energy. At the SC the #8 will have the lead as he is the 0.0 horse. the #2 actually loses lengths in the 2nd fraction so he will either have to gitty up thereby to hold his SP position and that will rob his energy in the final fraction.
The #5 has to gain 9 lengths in the 2nd fraction just to hold his 5th position and he is still 1.6 lengths back and 4 horses behind the leader. The rest of the horses are along for the exercise accept the #3 and #11. They are where they should be at the 1st call and being SP and S type horses are going to be running late.
If you find the correct pacelines these illustrations repeatedly will be reliable and you don't always have to bet the #1 and #2 ranked horse, especially strong E horses. In a thread on the Hat Check blog, Richie recounts Jim saying to him, "You give these sustained horses too much credit, Rich". The E horse is out in front sailing along. There are no traffic problems out there. There is no dirt or sand or clumps of grass flying back into their faces. An E horse that is not forced to run "Too fast, Too Early" is in front enjoying the view. He's not looking up another horse's ass. He's up front because he is the fastest horse. Now conformation, genetics and injury can stop these horses but you can see their limitations in their pps. Jim also hypothesized that a 1/5 of a second saved or expended in the 1st fraction is worth 2/5s in the final fraction. If the #8 saves 3 lengths in the 1st fraction that means he will be better by 6 lengths at the finish. He needed 5.6 lengths to beat the #3. He needed every bit of it.
This is my interpretation of the Match Up after studying it for 3 years. Mostly it has been reading and rereading the Hat Check blog. I have worked 100s of races and a lot of those have been screwing around with Configuration settings. When to use this one or when to use that one. Too many horses win at great prices with high negative DTV to have any confidence in it whatsoever. I don't have Jim Bradshaw's or Richie P's minds I can't do all that stuff in my head anymore but if you pick a setting stick with it and get used to the readouts it produces. Just as Jim and Richie developed Pattern Recognition skills based on RAW data, you need to develop your own Pattern Recognition skill in interpreting the readouts.
One man's Opinion.

[Bill Lyster]

Mark:

I have learned a lot from your last few posts and the ones provided by Richie of late. great to have your reasoning so evenly laid out. I hope you have time for more examples.

Thanks,