Time

[Calzone Lord]

Originally Posted by Indian Charlie

I think they are sometimes overrated, and biased.

I think most people on here will agree.

If you're trying to analyze a race and a performance...you're going to do a pretty piss poor job over the long run if you can't gauge how fast the race was run.

It's central to everything in handicapping...and anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool.

All of the angles, skills, stats, trip work, and clever betting you can do isn't going to get you far enough if you can't consistantly gauge fractions and final time VS track speed.

The commerical figures tend to do a very good job of that in situations where making a figure is easy.

In other situations...like Wood Memorial day when you have a strong head-wind down the backstretch and only one two-turn route carded all day and it's for young lightly raced horses ... accuracy becomes a lot tougher to achieve.

Some commerical figs try to bake stuff like weight and ground loss in - others don't. None of them are regionally biased or have some agenda.