If I may, I'm going to play a little devil's advocate here for the sake of discussion and say when selecting a single representative paceline to predict today's outcome, This may give you the runner's "ability level"...but would seem to ignore the condition and form cycle pattern of the runner when that particular representative paceline was earned...which could have no relationship to the current condition and form cycle pattern...which greatly affects today's "ability level." Thanks guys.

Ha yeah I was 2 out of 3 also.

Nice exacta in last to mention the 70/1 at least, although I fumbled the “him”…shoulda been “her”

Attached, here's a "bad favorite" checklist I picked up somewhere that may be of interest.

I understand the definitions BRIS gives that you posted. I'm not quite understanding their reasoning.

They're saying variable distance is the reason you use variable lengths for speed figures and since they're measuring fixed distance for pace calls, they can now use fixed lengths.

However, it's not directly the distance that is the reason for variable length on speed figures, it's the variable velocity caused by the distance.

It's fine when they say 44 flat could be a 90 figure whether it's a 5F dirt sprint or 1m turf route...but I'm unsure if it's fair to say beaten lengths would be the same all across that scale.

Wouldn't the measured lengths differ if Horse A at a 90 wanted to "even up" on Horse B at a 92 versus Horse C at a 60 wanting to catch Horse D at 62?

Ha just realized that pick was from yesterday. Oh well, for what it's worth #3 in the 7th for me today.

Race 7, I'm a win bet on that #3 as well. New Pace Top runner. Let's get it home Tony

Yea Messier looks pretty strong here. Maybe hurts the other short prices' confidence and some value can run into the exacta.

1 on top of 3,5

Nailed that Holy Bull, Ranch. That's great capping in what looked like a pretty wide open race.

Robert B Lewis at Santa Anita today pretty lacking. 5-horse field and 4 of them have early speed. Yikes.

Right on. I'll re-read our back and forth and see if I can get on the same page with some thoughts.

Initial thought though here would be that most of my longshots that were completely out of the public's eye were made completely blind of connections. Trainer/Jockey/Owner, throw it out maybe?

The public sets the price so perhaps you're looking for positive handicapping factors the public values the least.

If by "math of payoffs", you mean "value", then yeah. It's always about value.

Think about a horse moving forward quickly overall with faster pace and faster final. Is this good or bad?

Well, if he's 4/5, I'm going to argue it could have took too much out of him and he may be due to regress.
If he's 20/1, I'm going to argue he's just waking up and set to continue the improve.

Value is ultimately the deciding factor in whether something is good or bad. At the end of the day, no handicapping factor is 100% positive or negative, we just want to guess which way it is often enough to have a positive ROI.

#5 would have been a tough one to get to.
My back argument might be the significant improvement on both 4F pace and Final figure between his last 2 sprints as well as between last 2 routes. Possibly just waking up or recovering from minor ailment and kept moving forward here. Began as a turf horse which teaches energy distribution and promotes education in late acceleration so perhaps those dynamics played a part as well when he got the right set-up to go 7th to 1st here.

My longshots are geared toward positive form cycle patterns going into doing something different. New surface, new distance, new track, etc

I would have to go with #2 Zertz
Set a new pace top off a long layoff which is a powerful form cycle pattern. Should be more compressed here with energy and show improved late run.

That is Benny Southstreet's product. Follow his Twitter here: @BSouthstreet

He's sharp when it comes to trips as the program comments almost never tell the true story. Not of much use to the casual capper but is great info to supplement your normal capping if you're diving deep into a card.

It's a nice GUI and all but I really would prefer a format where I can see notes for all horses in the race on one screen rather than runner-by-runner.

My opinion is you reach this status with 100 likes rather than posts+replies.

This promotes productive threads rather than just a race to post whatever 100 times.

Ok, I got you...so it's a little bit of manual estimation to get your actual turn times. That makes sense, was just making sure there wasn't some awesome set of turn data out there I wasn't aware of.

Jim, I've considered playing around with turn times before but it seems to me the reported 2F, 4F, etc splits available fall into different spots on the track for different tracks. What are you using to figure the actual turn time around the turn?

Also, My 2 cents on the concept of inside runners vs outside runners in the turn is a much more difficult question to assess. Many have done the math to simply state that every path out from the rail a horse is, it costs them one length. However, I don't think ground loss can be this easily assumed to be a disadvantage.

From an energy distribution view, the inside horse is having to negotiate more centrifugal inertia while also sometimes on a flatter portion of the track while the outside horse may be on a more banked surface without fighting those centrifugal forces of circling a tighter turn. In the end, I think ground loss vs centrifugal forces can often cancel each other out in a general sense and it really just comes down to a case by case basis on the actual horse, track configuration, pace scenario, etc.

Note to add:
Marche Lorraine in the Distaff was an example of how clocker reports can mislead you in the wrong direction and a good example of what I labelled a "flowchart comment."

Her notes were..."on the wrong lead, no gallop out, C+"

So if you're skimming through and read that it looks like an automatic toss-out. Problem is there's a different direction that comment can go. What if the horse WASN'T on the wrong lead? A bad workout doesn't mean a bad race day.

Only throw horses based on a workout report if the comment is completely objective to being negative to their condition.

That's good to hear Tony, that's the idea. Would be helpful to choose horizontal sequences to study further if we could reliably draw a line through certain contenders right off the bat. I don't want to muddy this thread with daily updates on something theoretical but I will keep up on it and post the Excel file weekly or so to see if we can find a nice DTOP angle for eliminating short prices. What I can say is that on Day 1 none of the post-time favs were winners so promising start.