:D, :D

I think this is a great post and something in recent months I have come to understand much better.

The general public gets bogged down with the negative factors, or limited information.

Negative factors certainly decrease a horses chances of winning, but positive factors can often deliver prices that justify betting or using them in your wagers.

I prefer to look for positives myself.
Speed figure patterns are a big one.
I love to spot a horse sitting a big move.
Calibration Handicapping focused on the Red Scan technique and other moves.

Some other authors have listed things that they believe will somehow enhance a horse's upcoming performance, ie, a new pace top.

Maybe we should start a thread on this subject.

I believe that was in the early days of the method. Later he came to embrace best of last 3 as long as they came from comparable lines.

I may be wrong...but I recall Dick Schmidt posting on this very board that he used the horse's last "representative race" as a paceline 80+% of the time.

In "How Will Your Horse Run Today", Scott takes the opposite view. He concentrates on using the last race to indicate whether the horse will likely run poorly next out.

Actually, the 2 methods are not mutually exclusive. I always look for signs of both improving or declining form.

I agree. This would be a most interesting discussion...IMO.

This thread petered out but I want to revive it because I had a definite reason for bringing up the most important aspect of the topic, the reliability of negative factors.

Without being able to reliably toss horses from contention, it is impossible, IMO, to be able to know whether you're getting value on your selection. Not only do the unexpected pop up horses beat you from time to time in a race to race viewpoint, but those unexpected pop up horses will destroy your profitability in the long run viewpoint also.

In a 6 horse race, simple, fair odds, are 5/1, and 6/1 is overlay. If you are able to RELIABLY TOSS 3 of those horses, you now have 3 contenders, and simple, fair odds on the probable winners is 2/1, 5/2 being an overlay on the true contenders. If one of those 3 supposedly reliable tosses pops up and wins, after the fact you have learned that simple, fair odds on all contenders was 3/1, not 2/1, and overlay was 7/2, not 5/2.

The short of it is, if you can not reliably, confidently toss horses, you will find yourself betting underlays when you believe you are betting overlays, and betting underlays in this game will kill you.

About 15 years ago was when I first started making the first step in my selection process the elimination of horses I believed had little to no chance to win the race. As a W/P bettor, the mastering of this elimination process is absolutely paramount to my long term success, so I asked the question.....

Do you find the reliability of negative factors, those factors that lead us to toss horses, more reliable than the reliability of positive factors, those factors that lead us to support horses? And when seeing those factors in the horse's previous race, do they weigh heavier than seeing those same factors further in the past of a horse's racing career?

It's riskier to say that a particular horse will win its next race than it is to say that the horse will lose...simply because it stands to lose the vast majority of the time. This alone should make us more confident of our negative form indicators...IMO. In my own handicapping...a strong negative factor will often be enough of a reason, all by itself, to cause me to eliminate a particular horse from win-bet consideration. But I can't think of a single "positive" factor which will, by itself, cause me to place a win-bet on a horse. Selecting the potential winner is a more complicated affair than just crossing off a potential loser.

Very astute. What specifically do you consider a Strong Neg Factor? I am constantly learning which ones(negative factors), are the automatic tosses. Over the weekend, I'd zeroed in on a nice 23-1 longshot for a win bet, and one of my tosses closed in the stretch to win by a head. Since I'm primarily a Win and exacta bettor, I didn't have him coupled with the 16-1 toss horse. My over-confidence in the three horses with whom he was coupled for exactas did not give me the $20.40 place price to salvage the situation.

RDSS Tampons
 

Hey there
Im been not around long but looking at the PP"S
and seeing horses that been competitive against each other seem to do well win place and show.

I focus most on last race, but I don't think there's a hard fast formula for what works best all the time like last race, best of last 2, best of last 3, average of last 2, last representative race based on today's condition etc...

I think a horse's last 3-4 races probably account for 90% of everything you need to know (exceptions might be back turf, slop, and other exceptions) but how to weight them depends on a bunch of factors like how lightly raced the horse is, is he improving, go backwards, or relatively stable, how certain you are a specific race can be thrown out due to conditions/trip, trainer changes, etc...

I'd guess "on average" I put about 50% of the weight on a horse's last race and 25%, 15%, 10% on the next 3.

What that basically says is that if 2 horses are similar off the last race, the one with better overall record is more likely to win. If one is a little better off the last race but the other is better overall, they are similar etc..

Its very rarely that a horse wins that I toss as a non contender, I can usually eliminate 4-5 per 10 horse field. I would say maybe 2-3 per 100.

I use a combination of negative and positive factors, and track/race shape profile.

If the horse runs an uncharacteristically lackluster race last out, and you find no valid excuse for it...does this last race still account for 50% of your opinion on the horse? Or do you look at the horse's sharp PRIOR races...and skew the percentages in favor of the overall record?