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[classhandicapper]

In my experience, class is difficult to measure with lightly raced horses like these because you don't always know what a horse has in the tank until it's tested against better horses. The cheap ones wilt and don't duplicate their prior figures when challenged by better and the good ones up their game a bit and run a little faster. Figuring out which category a horse fits into beforehand is as much about probability (trainer, breeder, owner, pedigree, price paid, visual impression) as it is about actual knowledge of the horse (unless you get to see it work in company regularly).

But really, the primary use of class is to try to avoid the complicating and subjective errors innate in figure making.

The class handicapper is looking at who beat who with what trip. He doesn't have to worry about the impact of track speed changes, gusts of wind, the run up, the rail setting, malfunctioning timers, or the subjective interpretation of a figure maker. It's all on him to look at the quality of the field, how the race developed, and subjectively determine how well each horse ran. For those advantages, you occasionally have to deal with races and horses whose quality is not obvious to you. In those situations, it's probably better to look at the times to get you into the ballpark. IMO, there's no single right answer. Each situation calls for different tools. If I didn't think about this stuff so much, I'd still have hair. Tough game.

If you play a lot of statebred races at AQU, BEL, and SAR it's probably a good idea to keep profiles on horses coming from Finger Lakes so you learn the pecking order at both tracks and where they fit relative to each other.