Tapeta At Gulfstream Park
 

How do you guys feel about Gulfstream tearing out the outer turf ans Replacing it with Tapeta? I'm all for it. My home course is Woodbine and love playing it. It's a little harder to handicap but the payouts are worth it.

I think it's excellent. I would like to see more "3 course tracks" (e.g., NYRA) try it.

Laurel plans on installing tapeta in addition to its turf and dirt course when the total rebuild of the facility happens.

I hated it when horses were switching from the synthetic track of Arlington Park to the dirt track of Hawthorne...because the horses' form doesn't carry over from one surface to the other. And I will hate it even more now...when these surface change-overs will occur on the same track. Someone out there must think that handicapping horses is an easy endeavor...and needs to be made more difficult. :rolleyes:

I think that!

A game where handicapping is easy is a game where every winner pays $3.20 to win.

They're running out of green paint for the turf course.....

When Hollywood Park closed, they should have sent their excess supply over to Gulfstream.

You think WHAT? That proper handicapping has become an easy endeavor? Friend, this game is so difficult...the "winners" can only be found in the online chat rooms.

I didn't say it was easy. I said I favor it being difficult.

If we could safely have every race be a 14 horse field of closely matched horses, I think that would be great, even though such races would be very difficult to handicap.

What's the most bet race of the year? The Kentucky Derby, with 20 lightly raced horses. Bettors love a difficult puzzle.

Hollywood Park ended up being more sand than "Cushion Track" the last few years.

My math works out a little differently. If we have two surfaces now, and we can't get consistently full fields...then adding another surface will only thin out the fields even further. And I can't possibly see this as a positive.

Terrible idea.

I think I put in a code change for outer dirt when the outer turf thing bit me last year or the year before. I blamed the millennials.... it's not quite as bad as the referential integrity issue that crashed my db when one track decided to run two races simultaneously. Whoever thought that one up made my #1 sh*tlist. :)

Definitely being done bc so many races gets scratched down to nothing with the rain in Florida. I have a question though? Will they just use the Tapeta track when the turf is washed off or will they write it in the days form? So in the first case, will GP make the surface switch to an ALL race for will pays?

Count me skeptical of players that claim to have solved synthetics. And from my perspective, it's a monumental headache to weed through and try to make sense of the many, many form cuts showing starts on all three types of footing. While I do have a few (slightly) outside the box theories on when and why horses run better on what footing, minus the on-air imperative to give cogent commentary on such sets of past performances, on my time, playing other tracks with my own money, I simply avoid busting my brain on races wherein this is an issue.