Quote:
Originally Posted by bobphilo
Class,
I understand what you are saying about horses finishing hopelessly back and out of any purse money, but we are talking here about the difference between the top 2 finishers who are in contention for either 1st place or 2nd money. This also applies to 3 and 4 place finishers who are trying to get as much of the purse as possible.
I do agree that in many cases finish position may be of more importance than beaten lengths and you are correct in raising that issue. It is up to each handicapper to decide which measure is more important in each race situation.
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This is very simple.
If you have some interest in the gaps between horses as a meaningful metric of any type (and the original poster must because he brought it up), it varies from position to position. So if you look at the gap between 1st and 2nd and try to apply that more broadly in some way, you will be making a lot of incorrect assumptions. I base that on the 10's of thousands of races I have already looked at for every distance, on every surface, on every track condition, and with every field size.
If he's only interested in winning margins, then he's got the information he wants, but I can't imagine why you would want to know winning margins unless you were working towards a more comprehensive picture of race results.
Beyond that, I was explaining some of the reasons why the data looks like it does.
