Keeneland to expirement with new timing system.

[Suff]

This should prove interesting. I'd be willing to bet it will be everywhere inside of 12-18 Months. Or should be.

http://news.bloodhorse.com/viewstory.asp?id=24504

.

Keeneland president Nick Nicholson explained that an electronic chip and antenna, weighing less than four ounces, are placed inside a horse's saddle cloth to transmit data to receiving mounted antenna placed around the racing oval


During its meeting Monday at the Kentucky Horse Park near Lexington, Ky., the Kentucky Racing Authority gave Keeneland approval to conduct a pilot program using the TurfTrax Speed System that track's an individual horse's time at various stages of a race. The system, which will only be tested on a limited basis, also takes into account the horse's placement on the track as the race progresses in determining the horse's fractional times

[JustRalph]

I can't wait to see if the times for certain distances change much......it could be very interesting........great link

[BillW]

The article says it has already been tested in England. I wonder if agreeing to testing an already tested system is just a way to humor someone who is pushing this system.

It would be interesting to require this type of timing for all workouts.


Bill

[sjk]

I wonder if the data providers intend to convert times back to lengths in some well understood way or whether we will need to adjust to entirely different looking charts and PPs.

I would think that radically different data formats could be a big negative for many long time players.

I'm not looking forward to the reprogramming, but I guess more accurate data would have to be good once I got it sorted out.

[BillW]

Originally posted by sjk
I'm not looking forward to the reprogramming, but I guess more accurate data would have to be good once I got it sorted out.

Probably make the game tougher to beat also :eek:

[sq764]

I thought I read that they did this in Honk Kong racing already..

[Tom]

I will interestested to see what time a length is really worth!
This could be very enlightening.

[DJofSD]

It's about time (pun intended). Thanks, Suff.

placed inside a horse's saddle cloth

The will introduce an error. The error is the transmitter is not on the tip of the nose. (Hopefully they won't use it to determine the winner - "Hey, I don't care what the photo shows, my horses timer beat your horses timer by 2/100's of a second.")

At least it's a known error and can for the most part be taken into account.

Can you regress the data to leader fractional times and beaten lengths format- sure. But why? From a pure pace perspective I'll take the exact times with zero beaten lengths any day. If anything, we'll see a shift to differnt assignment of running styles based more upon velocity and decelaration than on running position or visual running style.

It will be interesting to see what the data will look like in the data bases when equipment fails or other problems occur.

DJofSD

[Tom]

It will most likey take years to catch on, but if we can get some hard data right now, say 1 length is equal to .1345555 seconds at 6 furlongs, we can start to use it now.
I just don't see a lot of tracks lining up to spend money that will onyl improve their product and not their bottom line.
Hopw many years did it take to at least get a lot of tracks to agree on common saddle cloth colors? :rolleyes:

[kenwoodallpromos]

I assume whoever figures out the conversions will use feet per second. Beyers type calculations can still be used.
I like the $20 Mutual Fun betting. It may help the pools if they can figure out how to get novices into the track to bet wildly on some secretary's handicapping.
The best thing abouit the article is if they time fractions for workouts. Could tell a lot about how some horses are worked at 5f and farther.

[Dan Montilion]

They could time the races with a wrist watch for all I care. However, I would like to get down on those golf carts.

Mutual Fun and Jude Feld... Lets just say I hope Jude is a better handicapper than he was trainer. Otherwise that $20 investment would be better off invested in the Iraqi currency market.

Dan (likes the #1 golf cart off of the re-charge) Montilion

[kitts]

Favorites pay $5 something now, down from the bigger prices pre-Beyer. Now we will have to live with $4 something.

I started playing when the DRF did not have internal fractions, horse for course, trainer stats, wet track records, lifetime turf and dirt records, turf and wet track ratings. The succesful handicapper had to keep their own records!

As time went on, this stuff is now there. The new precision timing should just about make handicapping a science.

[DJofSD]

Favorites pay $5 something now, down from the bigger prices pre-Beyer. Now we will have to live with $4 something.

I started playing when the DRF did not have internal fractions, horse for course, trainer stats, wet track records, lifetime turf and dirt records, turf and wet track ratings. The succesful handicapper had to keep their own records!

As time went on, this stuff is now there. The new precision timing should just about make handicapping a science.

I don't know if I agree that declining mutuals, if they are declining, are a direct result of increase access to this information that was previously not so readily available. Perhaps it's because of the size of the field of races now a days is smaller. Maybe it's because Bush is a liar <BG>.

I'd speculate that the public will continue to select winners at a 30-33% rate. They can have the $4 win 33%. I'll take the higher mutual from the remaining 66% of the winners.

DJofSD

[Tom]

Has anyone heard if/how this info will be shared with the public?

[cj]

I look forward to the day this info is freely available in the PPs. I don't think it will change mutuals, as most people will apply the info incorrectly or be perplexed by it.

[First_Place]

"I had been only dimly aware of those problems before the summer of 1992, when a pile of computer and video equipment appeared one day in the press box at Laurel. It was the creation of a midwesterner named Cary Charlson, who was trying to time horses in a manner appropriate to the latter portion of the twentieth century. Wasn't it absurd that we could know, in hundredths of a second, the time for the last place Ivory Coast relay team in the Olympics, but we could only estimate Arazi's time in the Kentucky Derby to the nearest fifth of a second?"

and

"The fractional times on which Sartin's disciples and others had based their calculations were routinely off by three-fifths of a second, four-fifths of a second, a full second--an eternity to a pace handicapper." --Andrew Beyer from Beyer On Speed, chapter five, The Mathematics of Pace, page 144.

Well, it's ABOUT TIME! It's ABOUT TIME! It's ABOUT TIME! Did I forget to mention that it's ABOUT TIME?? I won't begin to celebrate, however, until it's the norm for timing races and not just in the experimental, i.e., tryout phase.

FP

[BillW]

Originally posted by cj
I look forward to the day this info is freely available in the PPs. I don't think it will change mutuals, as most people will apply the info incorrectly or be perplexed by it.
Craig,

Yes they will be perplexed with the raw data in the form, as most are now. But let's consider a few possibilities for the "black box" computer handicapper.

Let's say data is available at a sample period of 100 mSec., A few examples of what could be done with adequate accuracy with this data would be trip analysis, daily bias and variant determination all without human intervention (i.e. computer performs trip analysis, going to the trouble of watching replays will no longer create an advantage). I don't know what the impact will be but with these improvements alone the "information gap "between the person putting in the effort necessary for successful handicapping and the blackbox player is bound to shrink.

The handicappers will have to pay the bill for this upgrade. Even a result of "no change" in the difficulty of the game will not be acceptable. The costs and associated effort in making this transition must show a positive return to make it worthwhile.


Bill

[takeout]

I just hope there are no exclusives involved. ;)

[depalma13]

Originally posted by DJofSD
It's about time (pun intended). Thanks, Suff.



The will introduce an error. The error is the transmitter is not on the tip of the nose. (Hopefully they won't use it to determine the winner - "Hey, I don't care what the photo shows, my horses timer beat your horses timer by 2/100's of a second.")


DJofSD

The error would be corrected by the fact that the transmitter would trip the start later by the equal distance from when the nose tripped the original teletimer. Meaning the nose won't start the teletimer as it passes, the transmitter will.

[Suff]

An Update on thier experiment.


Lexington, Ky. (October 28, 2004)- Officials of Equibase and Keeneland Race Course were encouraged with the results of an automated tracking system that was tested during the first two weeks of the fall meeting.
After reviewing preliminary information collected by TurfTrax, a British data collection company, both Phil O’Hara, president of Equibase, and Nick Nicholson, president of Keeneland, look forward to the day when more information will be available to the wagering public

http://www.equibase.com/news/releases/102804release.cfm

[Tom]

This would great to get a hold of this data and let everyone have a go at it for research purposes. Compare reality with the offical charts, find out what a "length" is really worth, etc.

[DJofSD]

This thread is almost a year old.

Did anything ever come from this "new" technology?

DJofSD