Handicapping with all the rain?

[andicap]

WIth all the rain in the northeast, most horses will have plenty of sloppy and muddy tracks in their recent PPs over the next month.

Unless you're a trainer handicapper how do you handicap these races? I hate going back 3 or 4 races to rate a horse but sloppy races just don't translate to fast track form.

I've never seen anything like it in New York except in the winter where you except it.

[cj]

To piggy back on this thread, how about all the "off the turf" races? I don't bet them, and its a good thing. I look at them and rarely would have had the winner. They are totally baffling to me. Horses with no dirt form winning. Horses with what looks like superior dirt numbers losing to other dirt horses with weaker numbers. My guess is that its good to bet against horses coming out of these races, but I have no real data to back it up. What do the rest of you think?

[mikekk]

Couln't agree more. It's really cramped my style; I usually make a few advance bets in the morning before heading off to work. Traditionally, most of those bets have been turf races, because that's where the odds are.

This year, I'm afraid to make a blind bet...horses that were going to run well on turf (at least I thought they were!) don't run a lick on off-dirt. Wish the trainers would catch on and scratch them, but I have a lick of losing bets that say they don't.

Mikekk

[Tom]

The mud races will obviously confuse the general public. That means there will be overlays if you can find them. I like to look at the horse' form cycle going in to the sloppy races - was he peaking and ready to improve, but didn't in the mud? If so, I would consider a race or two in the mud as just delays in the improving cycle and forgive them. Was the horse stale, or declining, then suddenly runs good in the slop? If so, I throw out those races.
I usually just draw a line through the off lines and look at the fast tracks - considering the off tracks as just workouts.
If a horse has run well in Belmont slop before, figured to run well the day he hit it again, and didn't, I look at that as a negative-the horse should have continued its improvement in spite of the mud and failed to do so. As always, you have to have odds-at 3-1, a bad mud line might not be forgivable, but at 9-1, I can get past it.
An old angle I have used as long as I can remember, is that a race over an off track, especially muddy or good, helps build an improving horse's condition and might hurt a horse who has been sharp for several races. the class the trainer enters in might be a tip off, too.
I watch out for slop biases as well, as excuses or reasons to throw out a horse.
I like to handicap the race before it is run in the slop, and then see if it ran like I thought-did something that finished out of the money throw out unusually fast early fractions and kill off the horses I thought would run good? Was there a bad rail that hurt or helped?
I handicap more from the charts than the PPs for these off track races.

[Valuist]

I don't know what it is about taken-off-the turf races, but many times the supposedly superior main track horses get beaten. I think the best thing to do is avoid these races, and play as few sloppy or muddy tracks as possible. Needless to say, I haven't bet Belmont or Monmouth much in the past month.

[GR1@HTR]

I used to beleive that I suck in capping wet races...Maybe I still do, but my records indicate that I pick about the same amount of winners for a dry dirt surface and a wet surface (of which I handicapped for a dry surface). ie I capped it thinking it would be dry and then it rained.

In wet races my top PL picked horse wins 29% for 1.04 ROI (90 races). In dry races my top PL picked horse wins 30% for .98 ROI(over 1000 races)...Pretty much the same difference...Plus I have heard that favorites win more in wet surfaces...Haven't tested that so I don't know if that is true.

[andicap]

Interesting GR1, but I'm also talking about handicapping on Fast tracks on days like today (85 and sunny!!) when the pps are full of "my" and "sy"

[pic6vic]

We all have our little quirks about off tracks. What I have found is that I do worse after the rains stop. I believe the reason is that if it rains for about a week or so and the horses can not work that it changes their form. Now you have a lot of horses that don't work because the track is closed. This is true for me in the winter at Santa Anita. This year was a good example. I was doing exceptional in the first part of Santa Anita. When the rains came I was ok with the off tracks, but once the rain stopped I couldn't find the winners. I play a lot of maiden races so this may have affected me more than most.

Just a thought about how the rain affects a player.