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SUCKER BETS---(part 13) 23---BETTING A HORSE WITH THE BEST TURF “NUMBERS” For as long as I can remember and for well over 40 years of daily on track attendance, I’ve heard countless players say that they like this or that horse in the upcoming turf race because he has the best “numbers”. Handicappers that make similar statements are about to make a “sucker bet”. Why? In order to make accurate daily track variants on the dirt, you must compare all the sprint “pars” for each sprint ran to each other to see the variances. You divide the sum total of all the variances by the number of sprints ran. This gives you the average variant for sprints. Once you do that for the sprints, you separately do the same for routes. This will give you an accurate picture of how fast the track was that specific day for both dirt sprints and dirt routes. In other words if you make your own speed figures for the dirt and want them as accurate as possible, you can’t simply merge sprints and routes together. After computing my own daily variants since the late 60’s, I can assure you that the sprint variant is most often faster than that of the routes. That being the case, you can see the trouble one can get into by averaging dirt sprints and routes together and coming up with a “lone” dirt variant for the day rather than the more accurate separate variants. By averaging them together, it would have the net effect of making the sprint variant slower and the route variant faster. So how does this tie into turf racing? It doesn’t-----and that’s only oneof the many problems in trying to make “numbers” on the turf. So what’s the multi-faceted problem? Most tracks card only 2 or 3 turf races a day due to the fragileness of the grass and how quickly the course can get chewed up. You can’t “re-grade” the living turf course after every race like you do the inert dirt course after every race. The best you can do is replace divots of grass thrown up in the prior race, but you can’t replace the overall wear and tear as is done when regrading a dirt course. With only 2 or 3 turf races a day, you have very little to compare on the grass as you do with 7 or 8 daily dirt races that will usually give you an accurate insight to the inherent speed of the dirt track on any given day. With valid dirt variants, you know if the number a horse earns in a race was actually fast or slow for a particular class and distance. Quite obviously, you are not afforded this same luxury with only 1, 2 or 3 daily turf races. In addition to the impossibility of making a turf “number” due to the impossibility of making a turf variant due to too few races, we have the constant “rails in and rails out” situation. Let’s take Santa Anita for an example. There are 5 rail positions for turf routes. They begin at 0 and then go out to 8, 15, 24 and 30 feet respectively. Yet Santa Anita only has 3 different starting gate positions. My entire staff at the DAILY SCHTW have tracked this for years. The same 3 gate positions that were obvious to me in 1992 are the same 3 gate positions that were used for this Spring 2006 meet and for the last 14 meets. The 3 gate positions for routes are as follows. One gate placement for both 0 and 8 feet out, another for 15 feet out by itself, and the final placement is for both 24 and 30 feet out. Can you see the problem? You can’t have the same gate position for 2 entirely different “rails out” situations. You need 5 separate and distinct gate placements!!!!! Every time the rails are moved further out, the starting gate should be moved forward to compensate. Why? Because moving the rails out actually enlarges the course! I’m not going to bore you with the math. If you need mathematical proof of this, any high school teacher can fill you in within 3 minutes. You simply can’t run a mile turf race with the rail at 0 and then next day run another mile turf race with the rails out 8 feet and see these races as equal in distance. They positively are not the same! When the gate placement for 0 and 8 feet out are identical, the horses in the race with the rails out 8 feet actually ran further. And no, they don’t change the “run up time” (the point where the race begins being electronically timed). The staff of the DAILY SCHTW have hand timed these races and the evidence is irrefutable. Santa Anita treats 0 feet out identically to 8 feet out. The same situation occurs at Santa Anita when the rails are out 24 or 30 feet. The gate placement is identical and there is no change in “run up time”. I once questioned the starter at Santa Anita about this situation and his exact reply was “the best horse will still win”. What??????????????? How’s that for race track management “Suit-speak”? It is painfully obvious that if the starting gate is not moved forward every time the rails are moved out, the final times of the races are positively incorrect. If the final times are incorrect, any variant generated from same has to be incorrect! Do you still think that you can make “valid” numbers on the turf at Santa Anita? If you do, you’re a “sucker”! PART 14----MORE “SUCKER” BETS
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