What product is missing?

[TravisVOX]

I'm currently in Madison, Wisconsin at the 2004 NATIONAL AUCTIONEERS CONVENTION. It's been a ton of help with my personal-business interests in mind, as well as my bid calling and someday race calling.

As I've been sitting through and enjoying these seminars, I've been intrigued on the business side of things. DRF etc. are businesses that I often think more as a public library. But, amongst all these providers, there are products or services that are missing.

I was jotting down ideas during one of the sleeping-seminars, haha, and came up with this arbitrary list...

1. Software that can help someone manage their database in a real easy way...everyone uses ACCESS, but what about those that can't handle it? I'm surprised it hasnt' been created.

2. Affordable wager-tracking software. This has always surprised me...real high prices on a lot of the products.

3. Truly customizable PP's....I want DRF w/out the variant and speed rating column, ya know?

Those were the first few that I came up with. My question for the board is this...

What products/services do you feel are missing in the t-bred/handicpaping industry?

[lefthandlow]

this is most likely impossile but.

I would like to have someone make a program or utility that

scratches the horses from a bris or tsn file before I run them

through my program or any software.

It would save lot of paper when printing and a lot less to look at

on the screen.. That's my dream program LL

[takeout]

I’ve always wanted to see the owner’s name put in with the trainer’s name in the previously trained bys so we would know if the horse actually changed ownership instead of just trainers.

And, straying a little, as this is more an issue with the tracks and Equibase and the industry as a whole and its integrity, but why couldn’t we see something like this if the situation warrented:

Previously trained by ___________ now serving a 15 day suspension for _________ ending on _________.

[cj]

Originally posted by lefthandlow
this is most likely impossile but.

I would like to have someone make a program or utility that

scratches the horses from a bris or tsn file before I run them

through my program or any software.

It would save lot of paper when printing and a lot less to look at

on the screen.. That's my dream program LL

I could be wrong, but I thought Bris' PP Generator and TSN's version did let you scratch horses so you didn't have to print them.

If you are exporting the files, it would be pretty easy to delete scratched horses before running the file in a program, just open it in any text editor.

[takeout]

Don’t know if this exactly makes it into the missing product category but I would also love to see DRF and BRIS get on the same page with Equibase with the trainer names. I recently had to change about 300 of them when I switched files and that was only for one track. I don’t think it’s right that the customer should have to go through that much mess because those two resellers won’t make their trainer names the same as everyone else’s.

[pasco]

I'm sorry I but I meant the bris data file for a buck and the tns.50 file.The comma del file.I want to scratch them or rather eliminate them from the file before I run them through a program.Then print out my #'s that my prgram generates.I have to manually delete them then print out the sheets I take to the track.Belmont lists 16 horses in say a turf race not it rains and I want only 5 in there.I don't want to look at all 16.Hope this helps.Pas

[Tom]

If Equibase is the mother of all data how do the names get so screwed up by all the vendors?
I know this is probably a silly idea, but wouldn't it be just as easy to identify trainers and jockeys but an ID number? I am sure they have them on thier licenses? I know the idea of useable data as opposed to data is not that widely understood in the industry, but surely, by some fluke, one or two of the data whores have hired someone with brains annd not related to the boss?
(HDW excluded- they actually have Quality Control and in the several years of data from them, I have never, ever seen a screwed up trainer or jockey...hmmmmm, THAT is the product missing in today's market.....Quality Control. Oh, yes, and customer service.)

:rolleyes:

[sjk]

Every license has a different number on it.

[takeout]

Originally posted by Tom
If Equibase is the mother of all data how do the names get so screwed up by all thevendors?
I don’t think they do. I think it’s just a DRF thing and because BRIS uses a DRF file, theirs are different too.

For some reason, DRF, while giving up the data collection duties to Equibase many years ago, continues to use its own database of trainer names instead of using those of THE data collector, Equibase. There are only three reasons that I can think of for this.
1. It will cost DRF a lot of MONEY to change them.
2. It’s a lot of WORK for DRF to change them.
3. DRF doesn’t care about such things.

What am I missing?

[Tom]

Originally posted by takeout
I don’t think they do. I think it’s just a DRF thing and because BRIS uses a DRF file, theirs are different too.

For some reason, DRF, while giving up the data collection duties to Equibase many years ago, continues to use its own database of trainer names instead of using those of THE data collector, Equibase. There are only three reasons that I can think of for this.
1. It will cost DRF a lot of MONEY to change them.
2. It’s a lot of WORK for DRF to change them.
3. DRF doesn’t care about such things.

What am I missing?

4. DRF doesn't know about such things.

:D

[thelyingthief]

yeah, that drf speed rating/variant sure is a major glitch in the universal matrix. some people USE that speed rating, you know?

[takeout]

Originally posted by Tom
4. DRF doesn't know about such things.

:D
Well, I guess that IS a possibility. :D

[takeout]

Originally posted by thelyingthief
some people USE that speed rating, you know?
I think the speed rating is safe. I seem to recall something in Crist’s book about DRF (or him?) wanting to get rid of them but they got too much of an uproar from the customers – or something like that.

[RonTiller]

We may have been through some of this before, but I'll chime in anyway.

Equibase does in fact store trainers and jockeys as numeric keys with associated names. These are purely internal keys though and as far as I know bear no relation to any license numbers. As each state licenses its own jockeys and trainers, there is no NATIONAL trainer ID number to which Equibase can hang its hat on. Believe me, this situation is acutely felt by the poor souls at Equibase who have to quality check the assignment of trainer, jockey and owner keys to the day's races.

I recall several case years ago where they had to really do some serious detective work with on track personel and licensing agencies in several states to determine whether a particular trainer at one track was the same person as a trainer at another track. It did not help that his license might be Bill Smith in one state and William R. Smith in another.

Years ago, before the DRF became a consumer of Equibase data, the VARs had a large role in resolving trainer and jockey name issues if they wanted to publish statistics. To this day, the single most complex programming I have written at HDW was the infrastructure required to track, assign, display and error check the assignment of correct trainer and jockey keys given nothing but a name in the file.

Equibase today does about as good a job as possible. I know this because I still run all the old error checking routines on every trainer and jockey key we get from Equibase and we rarely find any suspciious ones.

So 6 years ago I would have taken a bow for having clean trainer and jockey names in HDW data. Today, Equibase is responsible - we just send what they send - and that is not bow-worthy. I don't have the faintest clue why the DRF would have significantly different names, unless they do a significant amount of error checking and validation and find things that aren't evident to me, or they have their own detectives and don't share the data with Equibase.

Ron Tiller
HDW
Hopefully not a data whore but quite possibly a data junckie.

[Tom]

Originally posted by RonTiller


Hopefully not a data whore but quite possibly a data junckie.


Absolutely NOT.
You have my utmpost respect as a quality vendor. And you have good customer service. My hat is off to HDW.
You stand alone IMHO.

[takeout]

Originally posted by RonTiller
We may have been through some of this before,

We have. I was just too tired (read lazy) to search for it last night.

The DRF names are not significantly different these days. Just different enough to mess up a program I use that’s set up by trainer name. I never understood (and still don’t) why there should be any difference at all. DRF should send what Equibase sends them. I mean this isn’t something like Beyer or Tomlinson numbers. This is supposed to be, and there is no reason why it shouldn’t be, actual factual data that should be exactly the same from any reseller that it’s purchased from.

It was some years back (as you said) that they were just awful. I remember that. They were a damn joke then. In one instance they had the same trainer's name spelled four different ways. In another there was a trainer who had gotten divorced and gone back to her maiden name. She had been using her maiden name for about six years when I noticed that the Form still had her listed by her married name. The track program that uses Equibase data had it right so where was DRF for six years? And the list went on and on.

I’ve harped on all of this before but for the life of me I cannot figure out why DRF doesn’t send its customers (and that includes BRIS) the exact same trainer names that they are sent from Equibase.

[Tom]

In another thread, they are talking about off tracks and the high number of scratches that result, and it occurrs to me a ral neat prodcut would be visual charts - theat would show you:

1. A photo of the field at the wire, like the ones you see for the KY Derby every year, with every horse labeled with an arrow.
MEdowlands offers this for harness charts at their website, or at least they used to.

2. A photo of the track to use along with the designation of muddy, fast, good, sloppy, etc. The Deleware track today is what I think of when I see sloppy, but some tracks do not look at all like this when sloppy. Same with Fast - I have seen fast tracks yield clouds of dust all the way to sprays of water behind the horses! Side note: What does this wide range of off track designation do to wet track stats and resaearch? Can't help.

3. A photo of the flag each race, to use to compare wind speeds. Actually, with today's technoloym tracks could have -what are they called, wind-o-meters? LOL on the backstretch and in the stretch to give data for each race on the card. That might iron our some of those odd ball pace variations we see so often.


And one more product that would be helpful - the hore's weight for each race-not what he carried, what he actually weighed. Imagine doing form cycle analysis with horse weights and Beyer numbers? Boggles the mind!

[Charlie Judge]

In regard to scratches...

HDW is now supplying the AE (Also Eligible ) and MTO (Main Track Only) designations in their datafiles. I have started to recalculate the odds in a race with all the AE and MTO horses left out of the mix. These recalculated ranks and odds are available in my comma delimited files, and I hope to put them in my race reports in the near future.

Now this doesn't help if one of the AE horses draws in after a scratch in the main body of the race, but it's a start...

Samples are at:

www.track-judge.com

CAJ

[charleslanger]

A weather bot that retrieves hourly weather for the previous 24 hours(did track receive moisture after racing ended?) & the raceday forecast from say, AccuWeather..... for all tracks running that day...

That scratch thing would be a great idea: the bot would retrieve all at all tracks, auto-apply them, continuously re-check & update. It would print on screen/paper a report of each track: number of remaining betting interests for each race. And it would sound an alert to any scratches after racing begins

The only hitch is that scratches for some tracks appear much later than at Equibase site, and vice-versa.......
.

[Jeff P]

Yesterday I posted on this board a few paragraphs about the one thing that frustrates me the most: Scratches that catch me completely by surprise.

Today I did the coolest thing.

While playing from home I wrote a new module that will now forever be part of my main program. I wrote something I call my Scratch Bot. What it does is continually parse the Bris Supertote html looking for fresh scratches. When it finds one it automatically scratches the horse and throws a message box up on the screen telling me that the "#X" post position horse named "X" has been scratched from race "X" at track "X."

I'm simply dumb struck that I waited so long to tackle this given that I was able to create a working prototype in less than a day. After all the frustration I've had with scratches while playing from home (you're really in the dark without a live video feed) it's simply a thing of beauty to watch. Just start it up and let run in the background. It does its thing, constantly searching for fresh scratches. Whenever it finds one, it does all the work, and then lets you know about it.

But it doesn't have to stop with just scratches. In a day or two I'll also have it telling me whenever a track takes all of its races off the turf- and very likely processing those for me as well. And down the road a ways I can see it handling jockey changes. And further down the road I can even see it comparing the toteboard odds at three minutes to post against required odds as determined by the Models stored in my main program and then displaying a list of overlay bets on the screen for the user to make.

Man. Very Heady Stuff.




>

[sjk]

Jeff P,

I would encourage you tho go ahead and automate the overlay/bet selection process. I will probably not be any harder than what you have just done.

I automate my whole process, though I just use macros because it's easy and I know how. I recently put in a new macro which is the world's simplest thing to give me an updated list of the upcoming post times. This actually saves a lot of wear and tear on my brain trying to stay organized and keep from getting shut out. On the weekends I am often playing 10-12 tracks and trying to watch the races and a little extra organization is very helpful.

[hcap]

Been using Game Theorys' programs on and off for a while, for building a database from the equibase charts and fetching the daily program from TSN. There are fields in his eqparse program that lines up the TSN jock and trainer names with the equibase names. Although the spellings are totally different, the TSN names and Eqibase names are on the same record line. So you can build your database with both sets of names. During daily play you can connect up with past lines of jock and trainers using the daily TSN program

I have found that removing punctuation, and spaces from jockey and trainer names, helps consiistancy for database applications.

Many, I would say over 95% of the errors from equibase and TSN involve internal errors in how many spaces in a name and whether or not a comma or semicoln, for instance is used as a separator between parts of a name.
Makes it a bit more difficult to read, but does helps if your connecting a daily program to past performances. Of course if the name is misspelled, will not work.

[lefthandlow]

That program you wrote is where its at.Nice job!!

[DJofSD]

OK guys, here's the solution to the problem of trainer and jockey names being all over the map. As was already mentioned, licenses already have a unique number. We can use that to associate the specific individual to a "standard" name for these folks. Think of it as just another Tax Payer ID <g>.

And to take it just one step further, and to be consistent, we'll handle the administration of it just like we do with the four legged participants in the industry - but I don't think the trainers and jocks will go along with it. Let's curl back that upper lip and apply a little indelible ink, i.e. tatoo their license numbers just like the horses <BG>!

DJofSD

[BillW]

Originally posted by DJofSD
OK guys, here's the solution to the problem of trainer and jockey names being all over the map. As was already mentioned, licenses already have a unique number. We can use that to associate the specific individual to a "standard" name for these folks. Think of it as just another Tax Payer ID <g>.


This wouldn't work as trainers and Jocks hold a license for each state they work in. It is up to them to use the exact same name on all licenses ( which they don't)


And to take it just one step further, and to be consistent, we'll handle the administration of it just like we do with the four legged participants in the industry - but I don't think the trainers and jocks will go along with it. Let's curl back that upper lip and apply a little indelible ink, i.e. tatoo their license numbers just like the horses <BG>!

DJofSD

This on the other hand would work as each only has one upper lip :D

Bill

[Dave Schwartz]

DJofSD,

You solution is a good one but there are two problems:

1. This demands that the tracks participate and many of them won't.

I recall Ron Tiller telling me how some of the smaller tracks actually MAIL their charts in. With that kind of lack of technical savvy it is unrealistic to expect ALL tracks to do anything that is high tech.


2. It also forces the user to maintain the database of names to match the license numbers.

Like the tracks, many users are simply not prepared to take on this database management task.


Regards,
Dave Schwartz

[DJofSD]

Well, my post was mainly intended to be in jest.

But now I have to ask (primarily of Dave), what's wrong with having the tracks maintain the information in a data base? Aren't they doing it already with the horses? What's the diff?

A horse is foaled, it's registered with the JC. It gets a number and a tatoo. Done. If and when it runs, the horse inspector verifies the tatoo.

Why can't the JC do the same for at least the jockies - heck, it's a part of the name! Yes, there'd have to be a change at the level of each state but just because something would have to change should not prevent a system from being improved. Even the Wimbleton tennis club has changed over the last 30 years.

Fire away!

DJofSD

[Dave Schwartz]

DJ,

There isn't anything wrong with it. It just won't happen.

BTW, tracks don't keep databases. Equibase keeps databases.

Just think of all the little podunk tracks that run for a week or two here and there. They are simply not prepared to do the work necessary to make any kind of database work.

And remember who needs this... the players, not the tracks. They could care less whether or not we get better/accurate information. If there is no financial reason for doing anything, they aren't going to commit any resources to it.


Dave

[Marc At DRF]

takeout wrote:

"I don’t think they do. I think it’s just a DRF thing and because BRIS uses a DRF file, theirs are different too.

For some reason, DRF, while giving up the data collection duties to Equibase many years ago, continues to use its own database of trainer names instead of using those of THE data collector, Equibase. There are only three reasons that I can think of for this.
1. It will cost DRF a lot of MONEY to change them.
2. It’s a lot of WORK for DRF to change them.
3. DRF doesn’t care about such things.

What am I missing?"

You're missing plenty. We decided during last year's re-engineering that we wanted to keep the trainers' names identical to the way they had been historically carried in the Form. This cost the DRF more money, caused us more work and was done because the DRF cared about not changing trainer names in midstream and possibly confusing our customers.

[takeout]

Originally posted by Marc At DRF
We decided during last year's re-engineering that we wanted to keep the trainers' names identical to the way they had been historically carried in the Form. This cost the DRF more money, caused us more work and was done because the DRF cared about not changing trainer names in midstream and possibly confusing our customers.
Marc,

No disrespect intended but you’ve GOT to be kidding. Having trainer names formatted differently than those of Equibase has to create the height in confusion. How can DRF retain the integrity of its trainer names if they don’t change them when EQ does? This probably explains why the divorced trainer’s name never went back to her maiden name in the DRF files.

[kenwoodallpromos]

Just curious- in the last 6 years, how many new customers have you gotten to replace others? Does the official track programs carry current names or DRF "old style" ames, like your "old style" (as per DRF website) variants and speed ratings?

[Marc At DRF]

"Just curious- in the last 6 years, how many new customers have you gotten to replace others?"

Indicating that I will once again have to retire from a thread after I finish responding this time.

I gotta say, guys, the wild speculation is always a thrill to read and someday I'll learn not to step in.


"Having trainer names formatted differently than those of Equibase has to create the height in confusion. How can DRF retain the integrity of its trainer names if they don’t change them when EQ does? This probably explains why the divorced trainer’s name never went back to her maiden name in the DRF files."


6 years ago may have been one thing, but I'm referring strictly to the last year when our re-engineering was completed. You're teeing off on us for how things used to be, not how they are.

[Tadek]

Well, since we are in an exchange about DRF data let me add few words. The main problem with comma-delimited files from DRF is the fact that some fields are not exported – always contain empty space; ‘foreign race’ and sporadically ‘age restrictions’. For developers having their systems displaying a full ‘traditional’ race card those errors are very annoying and it seems there is no way DRF can correct them. Trainer name is represented differently from one running line to another – different order of the first name – last name or different abbreviation of the first name, which generates ‘previously trained by’ line in the display.

Why DRF is not providing – selling race cards in digital format directly is really difficult to understand. It is in the best interest of the company not only to provide single-file numeric-format race cards but also provide an Internet service where clients can connect directly to the server and automatically load all information they require – cards and results. The Internet wagering increased overall handle by 20% and yet DRF seems to be committed to repelling all new Internet players.

In one exchange with marketing people at DRF I’ve learned that they are unwilling to support outside developers because they don’t want their customers to go elsewhere for their software needs. That implies that the leadership of the company believes that Formulator completely covers player’s needs. I’ve tried to indicate that might not be the case but without success.

To be fair I have to admit that DRF’s track variant proved to be extremely effective – read profitable.

Regards

Tadek

[takeout]

Originally posted by Tadek
Trainer name is represented differently from one running line to another – different order of the first name – last name or different abbreviation of the first name, which generates ‘previously trained by’ line in the display.

I see this a lot in the PPs made with Equibase data as well. Same trainer today as the ‘previously trained by’ trainer.

[kenwoodallpromos]

I stand corrected as DRF decided last year to keep the old names the same. If names are not alsways correct at the other data places, I will not hold DRF's against them.

[takeout]

Originally posted by kenwoodallpromos
I stand corrected as DRF decided last year to keep the old names the same.
An insane decision, IMO.

DRF and EQ need to get together and decide who is really wearing the pants in their "relationship". It's the customers that suffer all of the confusion.

[charleslanger]

The pants are worn by Equibase: the data is theirs, DRF is a customer. As for Equibase changing something: their focus is selling in volume: meaning to them-- selling to casual bettors who'd be confused by a plethora of esoteric data- they likely feel today's young whippersnappers, with their short attention spans will be more impressed by cute graphics and color charts.
We should keep in mind that Equibase is populated with racetrack dinosaurs-- they would need to undertake a massive data project(and obtain the operating funds for such by asking each racetrack to pony up their share) that in their eyes would please just a few serious bettors & likely go unnoticed by the masses-- making little difference to their bottom line. Assuming they could be convinced this was justified, they would then have to convince each of those they request the funds from.

Also, if racetrack executives / licensing boards themselves can't sometimes tell off-hand who is really who-- short of bypassing privacy concerns & attaching to each name something like: the last 4 SSN digits, or similar number derived from the points in say, a thumbprint or facial scan........
.