Track at Saratoga Far Different Now
 

The track at Saratoga is far different now than it was at the beginning of the meet. The track is deep and tiring right now. There is really almost what I would call an anti-speed bias. The first few days of the meet was the opposite. It was very hard to close ground the first few days of the meet. There was definitely a speed-bias the first few days of the meet. It was the opposite last year. Last year the tracks was deep and tiring the first few days of the meet.

For people who are serious handicappers that bet big money, it is very important to take notes every day and make notes as to how the track is playing. There are many tracks such as Saratoga that can change quite a bit from day to day. It gives you a big edge as a handicapper if you can go back and check your notes and see how a track was playing on a certain day.

Recognizing tracks biases is not necessarily that easy. You obviously have to know what you're looking at. One horse going to wire to wire doesn't prove that there is a speed bias.

You use times of races to help?

Track biaes can change in the middle of the card as well. Track biases is so hard to measure because you never know from one day to the next. But the front end tends to be a bit tiring. I noticed this on Saturday.

I don't necessarily use times. It just depends. Just because a tracks is slow, it doesn't necessarily mean that speed won't hold. By the same token, I've seen lightening fast tracks that play very fair. I don't think there are any rules that you can rely on 100% of the time. In general, it seems that the really fast tracks favor speed more, but not always.

In the case of Saratoga, I think the generalization of a faster track favoring speed is probably accurate. The track appears to be deep and tiring right now and looks to be conducive to come-from-behinders. At the begining of the meet, the speed was holding. If you look at the times being run at the begiining of the meet compared to right now, I think the track was quite a bit faster at the beginning of the meet. So I do think that in the case of Saratoga, the faster the track is, the more it favors speed.

quite a change from opening day when the leaders were running sub 22 qtrs and were still at the wire.

Yes, exactly.

Thanks for the input.
How many days was it a drying track?
That's always the toughest for me to figure.