Do anyone win with Thorogragh

[castaway01]

I'm not a regular TG user though I have known some over the years. I'll say a few things in Thorograph's favor:

1) While participation on their forum has declined, they used to have some in-depth discussion of their numbers, race shapes, and their "way of handicapping". Especially 5 or 10 years ago, you could learn a lot on how to read the sheet patterns just from who their top posters picked and their explanations why. They also still have the red board room of old TG sheets, so if you want to learn how to use their stuff, the material is there.

I did see their Breeders Cup seminar before the card. If you bet their top picks for the weekend (and it's more who to look at and who to fade than "picks"), you would have been a winner. Not rich but a winner. In general their reads were strong, and they nailed the trifecta in the Classic. Of course it's a small sample, but just saying. (They have the seminar posted on YouTube if you want to go watch.)

2) The TG vs Ragozin thing is older than Mike Smith at this point and sides were long ago chosen, but I personally think the TG numbers are better now. Ragozin's figure makers seem to live in the past and from the examples I have seen, they make more mistakes than TG. They keep everything secret at Ragozin, so there's no way to really check their figures and results without paying or knowing someone who does, and I'm not doing that.

3) Jerry Brown is an advocate for the horseplayer and has at least tried to get the industry to listen as far as supertrainers, CAWs, and all the stuff we complain about here. Granted he's been about as successful as we have been at changing things, but I respect him for at least trying to point out the problems in racing. Doesn't mean you have to buy the product of course.

[paulbenny]

This is probably a historical perspective that has been discussed somewhere else on paceadvantage. Jerry Brown was part of "The Sheets" team and broke off many years ago with Thorograph. Len Friedman and "The Big Man" used to play the races after following Len Ragozin's lead and they were making very good plays before these products went more mainstream. Consistent with the whole business, the pari-mutuel payouts are not as rewarding using either of these products similar to when Andrew Beyer was not selling out to first the Racing Times I believe then DRF.

I interviewed with "Thorograph" to do some work for them and it is a pretty thorough review of the PPs. My only issue is the data from abroad and without getting into the weeds on that, it just is hard to rely on them like U.S. or Canadian based horses for a number of reasons.

All in all I used them to compare to timeformus and bris to see if anything is way off and if it is I might take advantage of that but that is not very common.

[woodbinepmi]

As a former Ragozin Sheet employee, I prefer Thorograph's layout much better. The biggest difference in the numbers from what I heard while working for them was that Jerry was a lot quicker on changing a number due to a variant than they would at the Sheets.

[Fingal]

Originally Posted by TrifectaBox

TG has a redboard room where you can see their product after a racing card for FREE



So you dont even have to buy it to make a judgement about its value.

That's how I learned to use the product because otherwise it's cost prohibitive to establish that learning curve. I think you're limited to 100 free downloads a year of past data of the last 2 days. (aka for Friday races you can still go back & get the sheets on Sunday)
It's a great way to get a feel for the patterns & what all the sheets display.

[Tom]

I do that a lot for big races, just out of curiosity.

Ans, everything is FREE between Christman and New Years.