Like you, BJ, I have never gotten it to work for me.

But his stuff is different.
Completely different application.

I've seen some of Ranch's work.
His concepts are very solid.

Race 1 Parx, 10/24/22 (today)

A field of early energy horses (fairly high %M) going 5.5f, a dash. Should be a normal pace race. All of the horses have a similar early energy.

#4 shows to be the early pace horse, gets the lead. #1 shows to have early foot and class, breaks a little off, moves up and runs down the 4.

Nothing special about this race, but that's what the %M told me... nothing special to be concerned about, handicap it normally.

It's when there's a field of low %M horses that I get more creative in my handicapping.

thxs


Your first sentence says "fairly high %M at 5.5"

How do you know that?

That may not have been as clear as it should have been. I didn't mean their history at 5.5. I meant that they were going 5.5 today.

it sounds like your going off the top of your head with no real rules...

correct?

Incorrect. I take the %M of all prior races and take the median of those. I divide those into 6 levels of early to late. I then take the median value for those 6 levels. If it leans late (on dirt) for the field, I get creative.

thx....got it

That's what I'm interested in also. I'm trying to measure the past more accurately.

The complexity for me is that each horse is different in terms of how it reacts to various pace and flow conditions even when the running styles are the same. IMO, all the formulas and handicapping dictums are wrong some of the time other than if we are talking about the "average" horse.

So the trick to getting value is not being on the same page as everyone else. It's understanding where all the commonly held views are wrong for some individual horse.

Many years ago when I first started to use Sartin software, all I had was Phase III, and I only played Hollywood, Santa Anita, and 8.5 furlong races. I labored hard to enter all pacelines with 8.5 f, dirt races on each entrant. I also made a model of each trach's m% energy, all winners at these tracks, at 8.5 f dirt. I would locate the paceline that most "fit" the entrants "normal" flow of success. Then was able to eliminate those entrants, not fitting %m energy requirements for a particular race. Usually I was able to "pin" it down to 2-3 entrants. It was surprising, because many times the favorite was eliminated.

I had more success, at Hollywood, but good success at Santa Anita. For some reason unknown to me, Del Mar didn't work, probably because I didn't have enough races to model, but never figured it out.

I stopped doing this procedure, very time consuming, putting manually all the pacelines in, and for some reason, I can't remember, I lost interest. But for awhile it was amazing!!

Nowadays, I can't handicap without 5 Hour Energy.


Berry.

With Phase III, you need "6"!!!