Newcomer’s #4

The 4th installment under the heading of “ideas for newcomer’s to consider.  Today we will briefly discuss “making adjustments” to your figures.  Since I publish the Jerry J’s Power Page and I know these numbers represent “current form” I will confine my remarks to adjusting the numbers I publish.  But if you fool around with other numbers or with times or distance distinctions between horse, you can fiddle a system of your own!

So for tonight’s discussion, we will talk about speed duels and their relative effect on final time performance.  Let’s suppose Horse A has a PPN of 70.0.  And when we look at our Past Performance newspaper, we see this horse is always 1st or 2nd at the first two calls of each race … Then we scan over to his finish and we notice that when this Horse’s final finish is pretty good when he is able to Open UP some distance on the field between the 1st and 2nd call.  But when Horse A is NOT ABLE to open up some distance between the first two calls, the finish is not nearly so good.  This is the profile of a “need to lead” type of race horse, who when the competition for Early Position is fierce, tends not to be able to finish.   In the end, finishing is at the heart of winning your wager.

So now that we know Horse A is a Need to Lead type, we can scan the other horses in the race, and whenever we find a horse that tries for the early lead, we can look at the speed figures (and I would add – look at the weight both horses are carrying)- if we find other horses that can run equally fast early, we might consider downgrading the PPN by  1 point.  If we find there are two, then we might downgrade the horse by another point.  So it’s easy to change my PPN from the published 70.0 to a 69.0 or even a 68.0 if the prospect of a Speed Duel is on the table.

On the other hand, if you look at the other horses, and they don’t appear to have the equal or superior speed of Horse A, then we have to adjust the other horses’s down as well!

Think about the comparative analysis and the “profile” of each horse…  The adjustments are basically a common sense type of approach…