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badcompany
01-06-2010, 10:24 PM
have day jobs?

It's hard to imagine that the guys who race at the Buffalo/Batavia circuit can cover their nut racing three days a week for small purses.

botster
01-06-2010, 10:41 PM
have day jobs?

It's hard to imagine that the guys who race at the Buffalo/Batavia circuit can cover their nut racing three days a week for small purses.

Many do, guys with only a few head race off to other jobs after training duties have ended.Others cut all kinds of penny pinching deals to survive.

Some of these deals include, feeding other trainers horses,shipping horses,and warming up others horses and paddocking others horses on race night.The majority of horsemen are hanging on by the proverbial thread while being squeezed out by the incompetance of jurisdictions not enabeling it to be a level playing field for them.

wilderness
01-07-2010, 12:04 AM
have day jobs?

It's hard to imagine that the guys who race at the Buffalo/Batavia circuit can cover their nut racing three days a week for small purses.

There's circuits plenty worse than Buffalo/Batavia.

How's you like to be a horseman in Michigan, Ohio, Mississippi, Tennessee, or even Kentucky?

Lexington has the big sponsored stakes in the fall, however generally speaking their overnights are dismal and not much different from Thunder Ridge Raceway and Bluegrass Downs (also in Kentucky).

There are many, many horsemen that work traditional jobs to support their families and maintain their horses as well. I recall reading once of one owner giving his Standardbreds their daily jogging while it was still dark and before he went to work (and nobody was ringing that damn bell like they did for Seabiscuit)

Sea Biscuit
01-07-2010, 01:13 AM
There's circuits plenty worse than Buffalo/Batavia.

How's you like to be a horseman in Michigan, Ohio, Mississippi, Tennessee, or even Kentucky?

Lexington has the big sponsored stakes in the fall, however generally speaking their overnights are dismal and not much different from Thunder Ridge Raceway and Bluegrass Downs (also in Kentucky).

There are many, many horsemen that work traditional jobs to support their families and maintain their horses as well. I recall reading once of one owner giving his Standardbreds their daily jogging while it was still dark and before he went to work (and nobody was ringing that damn bell like they did for Seabiscuit)


Did somebody mention Sea Biscuit. My favorite horse. He turned War Admiral into a rear Admiral in that classic two horse race.

A little horse with a big heart. A true champion


Sea Biscuit.

LottaKash
01-07-2010, 02:32 AM
Did somebody mention Sea Biscuit. My favorite horse. He turned War Admiral into a rear Admiral in that classic two horse race.

A little horse with a big heart. A true champion


Sea Biscuit.

Biscuit, is that why you came up for air, you heard that bell-ringing ?.....

Where you been ?

best,

Sea Biscuit
01-07-2010, 08:18 AM
Biscuit, is that why you came up for air, you heard that bell-ringing ?.....

Where you been ?

best,

Hey its nice to hear from you John.

I have been working on my speed ratings overtime.

Its tough to figure out who went how fast in what temperatures, wind, and wind chill factors.

I hope you have a chapter in your forthcoming book to cover all that. Never could trust those TM speed ratings

Sea Biscuit

fmolf
01-07-2010, 10:21 AM
the tm speed ratings are inaccurate?....What about their class ratings?
A novice here trying to learn.Really i have been into t breds only for the last 35 years so not completely in the dark....feel free to help educate me :lol:

Sea Biscuit
01-07-2010, 10:37 AM
the tm speed ratings are inaccurate?....What about their class ratings?
A novice here trying to learn.Really i have been into t breds only for the last 35 years so not completely in the dark....feel free to help educate me :lol:

Any speed ratings that do not take the internal fractions into consideration and adjust them are in my opinion no good. I do not know if they are inaccurate or not but I am much more comfortable with my own speed ratings.

As far as they class ratings goes I never even look at it. I play only the Woodbine/Mohawk circuit and I am fully aware and understand the classifications they have there.

Sea Biscuit

Ray2000
01-07-2010, 10:56 AM
As for TM speed ratings this is their information on how its calculated

http://www.trackmaster.com/harness/info/srcr.htm
http://www.trackmaster.com/harness/info/ratings.htm

I'm concerned that they don't handle the trailing tier starters correctly and don't release the Track Speed Ratings they use, so I, like the Biscuit, use my own.

As for race class, here they're taking an weighted average of all speed ratings for all horses entered into todays race for the last 3 months. This is more reliable since errors tend to cancel out, even same-way errors because what is important is class shift not class value. BTW the class of the race is adjusted in the pp lines to account for scratches.

DeanT
01-07-2010, 11:10 AM
Ray,

What is your thought on half mile track speed ratings, when the horse is moving to a mile track? I personally find those to be out of whack - almost without fail a YR horse moving to Chester or the M will be ranked too high.

I could be totally wrong, so wondering what you think.

Edit: Whooops, thread hijack there, sorry!

Bad Co: Head to Prince Edward Island and see 42 starts 8 wins 9 seconds and 12 thirds with earnings of $11,000. Yep, those guys have day jobs :)

Ray2000
01-07-2010, 11:29 AM
Dean

I do think TM has 1/2 miler tracks rated too slow in their base TSR data, particularly for Yonkers and particularly for trotters. They have a different formula for trotters, which makes no sense to me.

So if a horse goes in 1:55 at YR the Track Speed Rating factor bumps him up too high.


You mentioned the thread hi-jac...

Pace Advantage Harness Forum reminds me of an old "Mom and Pop" Bookstore. Books everywhere and it's fun to browse for nuggets...:)

DeanT
01-07-2010, 11:34 AM
Thanks Ray. That's good to know.

It is amazing Bad Company still talks to us but us harness types tend to stick together, even if we screw up threads :)

markgoldie
01-07-2010, 01:23 PM
the tm speed ratings are inaccurate?....What about their class ratings?
A novice here trying to learn.Really i have been into t breds only for the last 35 years so not completely in the dark....feel free to help educate me :lol:

Hey Fmolf;

Here's my take. An individual could make power ratings that are more acuurate than TM's but for me, at least, it's far too time-consuming and the additional accuracy that we're talking about is well withing the margin of unknown factors that are present anyway when handicapping a race (the precise physical condition of the horse and more importantly, the exact trip the horse will get- remember: in this game, trips are VERY important).

The class ratings are wrong IMO and almost always too high. For me, the important thing about the class the horse is racing in is the CURRENT FORM OF THE ANIMALS IN THE RACE. Since this turns out to be a grab-bag so to speak, you will often find that class anomalies exist such that a given $10,000 claimer may indeed be stronger than a given $12,500 or even $15,000 claimer. Happens all the time.

The essential question becomes one of your belief system relative to speed figs. If you are in the Beyer camp, with his disciples, you believe that the teletimer rules the world (with necessary adjustments, of course) and that class is an archaic concept from the dark ages of handicapping. If you are of the older school (or maybe a revivalist school), you believe that the class in which a horse performs will affect his performance and thereby is a necessary determinant to handicapping.

Personally, I am convinced that class IS indeed a pertinent factor for reasons that would take me pages to explain (but I'll spare you). Therefore, I adjust the TM class numbers to what I believe is a correct average of the current form of the competing animals. However, I use their basic number standard, which means that I ususally wind up downgrading their posted number by a few points or so. In certain cases, more than a few points.

At any rate, back to the accuracy of their power number (or fig): Unfortunately there are inter-track anomalies with these numbers. That is, at some tracks the numbers tend to be higher than others. So right off the bat if you're going to use them, you have to know which tracks are "true" and which are inflated. Second, and here's what leads the numbers users to doubt their accuracy, the numbers must be ADJUSTED TO THE PACE OF THE RACE. I have written about this before and you can look it up on this forum.

However, once you adjust the number AND you apply the inter-track differences, you will get a pretty accurate number. THEN, you apply the class rating for a good snapshot of the strength of the horse's performance. Here too, trips are important when interpreting the number, so there's a lot to learn and know.

Right now at The Meadowlands we are seeing the ultimate challenge of converting performances from different tracks into a usable estimate of performance on their mile track. The variables are daunting because not only must you convert the different-venue performances into a single standard, you must also predict how the animal will take to racing on a different size track (since most of them are coming from 5/8 and 1/2 mile tracks). Even those coming from BMLP, which is another mile oval are facing a different turn configuration and style of racing, due to a somewhat shorter stretch at the Big M. So it's handicapping challenge of the highest order. Which is one way of looking at it. The other way is that it's impossible, so forget it. But I'm a hard-headed sucker so I view it as a challenge.

Anyway, I'm rambling on here probably because I like the sound of my own voice, but I actually have a lot of work I should be doing. So let me get another cup of coffee and get back to it. Talk to you later.

Mark

PS. To Bad Company: Sorry for the hijacking of your thread but as others have said, the short answer to your question is, yes, many of them have other jobs or make their poor wives put the actual bread on the table.