Here's something that Andicap told me that I found useful:

I use energy to detect races that had more of a front-end skew than others by examining the 1st and 2nd calls. I promote horses who pressed the pace in races where the %E is above average in either call, especially those that remained competitive to the end. I demote closers who fail to exploit these set-ups.

I've found a number of high early energy races where the pace figures didn't point to an abnormal front end pressure but where the leaders came back strong when the pace figured to be less energy intensive.

Horses with poor speed numbers, poor pace potential, poor pace lines and poor connections just don’t win often enough to make them worthwhile win bet potential wagers, especially if you are making a single win wager.

Good topic.

I am reading Ziemba’s Exotic Betting at the Racetrack, just getting started. He points up how many heavy favorites win.

So, in my opinion, there’s usually up to 4 horses in a race with a shot. Those 4 are horses that figure. My reason for going to a longshot is pace… always pace, with the setup for speed or close.

I look to see what the horses did in their pace line race. Then, the speed and class of their recent races. Then, figure how all that fits to the form cycle.

Lasix has me in shape. I had a race with Bolt scheduled, but he found out I cheated on the lane assignments and he backed out. Gutless.

Thank you all. I knew this was going to be difficult, but it’s all going so well that I may be released tomorrow.

Of course. This is obvious. — Dave Schwartz

Well, the question did arise.

When I say, PARS I am referring to the track par - how fast the track is - as opposed to what's the par for this race? — Dave Schwartz

When I think of a par, I think in terms of a speed for a distance at a track. So, I can then look at a past performance line and evaluate how well a horse did when it ran a mile at SA as opposed to 5f at FG or 7f at SAR. Does that seem to conform to your definition and usage of pars?

My main point was that in terms of fps or mph, a mile race is almost always going to be slower than a 5f race, so that is one of the reasons we cannot use raw times.

Also, generally speaking, the longer the distance, the slower the speed. So, you have to compare to some standard for the distance. And, those standards, pars, can vary by track.

LOOK FOR WAYS TO DESCRIBE SCENARIOS WITH WORDS

Can you elaborate? I didn’t understand where this was explained.

I don't think I understand how you are defining "leverage point". Could you clarify that, please?

I have firmed up my process. We'll see how it works this next week.

A couple of months ago, I talked to Dave and came to realize that while I have the components, my process sucked (my words, not Dave's). I use my own software, so I better organzied the software and established a process. My results improved.

Since then, I have found some even better components. Unfortunately, I didn't stop and establish how to incorporate this new knowledge into the process. Dave has convinced me that the process is extremely important.

In reading through this very interesting thread, I have come to a course of action. I am going to journal my process and step through each race and then post mortem the race to see what worked and what failed. This idea was sparked by what Jack had to say. I'm mid-pack in the contest... with a little better luck this weekend (4 seconds, 1 third, 1 fourth) I would be higher, but still nowhere near Jack's level.

One thing that I tend to do right is to learn. i look forward to a lot more of that.

Respectfully, I am not currently ready to provide those.

Maybe one of my best discoveries has been that you learn a lot more from a horse's good races than you do from the poor races. And competitive races are even better.

I have homegrown software. A lot of my best ideas have come from reading forums and either using posted ideas directly or with a few modifications. I've "stolen" a lot of ideas and I've been surprised by how many pan out to be reasonably good considering that so much chat is pretty mindless on some boards.

I'd have to say that the most elusive factor for the longest time for me was class and class/ability. It's amazing how many really good horses go off at 5/1 and better.

I just had another thought. Organize your calculations between what needs to be re-calculated for scratches and what doesn't.

Let's say you have 10 sections to your handicapping program. And, you use Strength in 6 of those sections. At the top of your program, you can store the Strength value. As you go in and out and in each of the 6 sections where Strength is displayed, you can access it as an already computed value, which is faster than recomputing it every time. And, obviously you are only computing it one time, which means you are only computing it one way... which is clearly way better than the way a beginner might do it, computing in each of the 6 sections, possibly resulting in 6 different ways of calculating the value. Obviously there needs to be a function to calculate Strength.

Yes, you can have more than one value. My last example there holds the values in an array, but you could pass in multiple parameters. That might get a bit tricky if you're not always passing all of the parameters in and out.

Now that you understand that, you could pass in two values. One is the lookup and the other is the change value (or no value). You could then have a do case structure to lookup the value.

do case
case cY == "TURN TIME"
xReturn := aMyStaticValues[hManifest_Constant_For_TURN_TIME]
case cY == "%MEDIAN"
xReturn := aMyStaticValues[hManifest_Constant_For_%MEDIAN]
end case

Yes