As a very longtime and satisfied user of these sheets and one who made figures myself in the 80\'s, i understand the methodology behind making figures. All of which leads me to ask about the Thorograph Arrogate figures. These days i get several sets of figures. Most had this horse fast.
One of the most difficult tasks is to make figures that equate west coast horses to east coast horses. The fact is that there are not many points of common reference. But it matters on big days when these horses get together.
I\'d welcome feedback from other users and the figure maker here.
He was slow as hell on T-G sheets, out of the 13 runners only 2 others were slower. No one on this planet could predict that performance just using the sheets. Even Bejarano\'s agent put him on the 2 instead of the 1. Just turn the page. In most cases T-Gs help you cash huge, just not in that case. I\'m pretty sure whatever I spent on T-Gs over the last 30 years, I\'ve made back in spades. No worries.
The biggest positive was Baffert is 49% wins off a pair in the last 90 days. That\'s one stat that might have led you to reconsider him. You should use those trainer profiles. I suspect many T-G players ignore them but they\'re unbelievable in helping you to throw out favorites and maybe spot a long shot.
From Grening DRF article:
Rafael Bejarano had ridden Arrogate in his three previous victories, but he also had ridden American Freedom to a victory in the Iowa Derby and a runner-up finish in the Haskell Invitational. Bejarano said owner Gary West wanted him to ride American Freedom.
"I wanted to ride [Arrogate], but there was nothing I could do because the owner wanted me to ride that other horse," said Bejarano, adding that Arrogate "was much better than the other horses and he loved the distance."
wow thanks for that; wish i had it yesterday! you think one of those talking heads on TVG might have shared that
Don\'t peg your future on those.
Sekrah is to given high marks and his comment should lead to a board discussion about to to handicap good eloping 3 year olds.I preface my comments with the fact that I had not a nickel on the winner yesterday and - of course, in hindsight, strongly believe I missed a real opportunity. I start out with two premises. One, 3 year old are essentially teenagers growing into themselves. Second, foot sheets players ( broad generalization to follow) there is too much of a tendency , IMO, to look at a 3 year olds back number as a basis for predicting that days race. I understand the methodology but it is not the only way to go and, it can be argued, is somewhat antithetical to the concept of development, particularly in a lightly raced horse. I prefer to try to find a 3 year old who has a real.chance to run a new top. I grant you the new top may or may not be fast enough to win the race but such horses will usually be lightly bet. When I did the race- - and I spent a lot of time,-I did not believe more than a 1-2 would be be required to win. We can debate that wisdom some other time.( I hated American Freedom- had run too fast, too often in too shorter period for my taste. ) But that led me to Destin, Gift box and Connect- and the sound of ripping tickets. if you adjust, as Sekrah did, Arrogates last to something less than a 4 , coupled with his being lightly raced AND bred to do the distance, and being a Juddmonte horse, it is hardly a reach to ask him to run a 1 yesterday. ( I won\'t even guess what jerry will give him). More to the point, if you look at many of the horses that were bet yesterday, either because of patterns or Breeding- let\'s not forget that even sheets players should pay attention to that in 1 1/4 mice- many on this board, if nothing else, should have concluded the winner was going to move forward, at a price. My congrats to Sekrah- there are many lessons for all of us in a game that requires an open mind and education. It is irrelevant to this discussion that he freaked, broke the track record etc. Nobody saw that coming.
forgive the typos- eloping was developing and mice was mile😁
FYI The RAGS guys made huge scores on the TRAVERS as Arrogate on the RAGS was 2ND fastest to throw out Exxagerator and had a very good pattern.
Makes no sense unless I am missing something.
The same owner doesn\'t own both horses.
Yes, Bejarano said that the owner of American Freedome wanted him to ride American FReedom. So what? If we wanted to ride the other horse, and that owner wanted him, why can\'t he make that call.
Just to make sure you don\'t think this is staying up because I missed it, I see it, and I\'m letting it stay anyway. Just like your guys would.
Dana666 Wrote:
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> wow thanks for that; wish i had it yesterday! you
> think one of those talking heads on TVG might have
> shared that
Early in the day two of the TVG anchors talked at length about Arrogate with the one basically being giddy and telling the world that he would get all his money for that race and that he was his play of the day.
They were promoting their \"double the odds deal\" for the Traverse. They counted down the final hour of the deal and every time they went back to the studio he pounded the post harder than the last for Arrogate. Saying that you could lock in 20-1 on that horse if you bet before the end of the hour and that you just can\'t pass that up etc. etc. I didn\'t hear the jockey quote but they did hype the horse at length in the am.
Dana666 Wrote:
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> The biggest positive was Baffert is 49% wins off a
> pair in the last 90 days. That\'s one stat that
> might have led you to reconsider him. You should
> use those trainer profiles. I suspect many T-G
> players ignore them but they\'re unbelievable in
> helping you to throw out favorites and maybe spot
> a long shot.
The trainer stats for the #2 in the Ballerina were a great example of what you\'re talking about. Fantastic resource, particularly when they\'re as glaring as a few this weekend were.
You didn\'t need [The Sheets] to be interested in ARROGATE ... especially at the price. His 103 BSF, last time out, was tops in the race along with the favorite.
Thoro-Graph is a quality product, but I am surprised at the discrepancy here.
the 103 was two races back.
jimbo66 Wrote:
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> Makes no sense unless I am missing something.
>
> The same owner doesn\'t own both horses.
>
> Yes, Bejarano said that the owner of American
> Freedome wanted him to ride American FReedom. So
> what? If we wanted to ride the other horse, and
> that owner wanted him, why can\'t he make that
> call.
Gary and Mary West own American Freedom. They do a lot of business with Baffert, and by extension Bejarano. Juddmonte Farms owns Arrogate.
Its probably good for business if Bejarano rides for West in that race.
arhidia wrote:
FYI The RAGS guys made huge scores on the TRAVERS as Arrogate on the RAGS was 2ND fastest to throw out Exxagerator and had a very good pattern.
This claim is false. The reality is that on Ragozin, AMERICAN FREEDOM, GOVERNOR MALIBU, EXAGGERATOR, DESTIN, GIFT BOX, CONNECT, and GUN RUNNER were all \"faster\" than ARROGATE.
While there is no doubt that Jon Hardoon crushed this race, what his followers did remains to be heard. I do know several very good Ragozin handicappers, including myself, who made no such \"huge scores\". Personally, I felt that given the data I was using, GUN RUNNER at 10-1 was better value than ARROGATE at 12-1. Looking back, I was dead wrong.
Where did I err? In retrospect, several areas, including: ignoring the horrible post position on GUN RUNNER and giving him too much credit for his previous forward moving performances in 11, 10, and 20 horse fields.
But my greater mistake was ignoring my awareness of the continuously emerging changes in the winning Derby profile. No strong 2yo. foundation? So what? It\'s become clear that it\'s now only a matter of \"when\", not \"if\" the so-called \"APOLLO\" curse will be broken. Lightly raced? It\'s become an advantage, not a disadvantage, in my mind. No final prep at 9 furlongs or more? Who cares.
Just as the small new top on Ragozin indicated a big step forward was highly possible, so did the tripled-up tops on Thoro-Graph. If you love a paired-up top on a lightly raced 3yo, don\'t you have to adore the third one in terms of the horse\'s future? If the pair makes him highly explosive, doesn\'t the tripled-up top make it even more likely the big jump is coming soon? We\'re not talking about an older horse who has put forth three efforts in a row and is likely to regress, but a developing, extremely talented, lightly raced young 3yo.
I remember when Baffert was interviewed years ago and someone asked him, what about \"seasoning\"? His reply was seasoning is for food, not horses. So, how talented is this horse? Even though I\'m a confirmed final speed figure guy who tends to ignore pace (maybe too much), I\'ve made it no secret I like Trakus. Break down ARROGATE\'s fractions in 2 of his 3 last routes prior to the Travers, and you\'ll see that he ran each quarter-mile as fast or faster than the next. Fast horses aren\'t supposed to be able to do that. Even very good dirt horses are supposed to start out faster, and slow down as the race goes on. Only the great ones (on the dirt) seem to be capable of running faster and faster as the race goes on. So those two past performances, from an incremental internal speed analysis, were pretty darn good predictors of the incredible ability ARROGATE possessed to carry his speed a distance in that fashion. I ignored that. Nobody\'s fault but mine, certainly not a figure-maker. Only his opening quarter was faster than his closing quarter mile on Saturday.
So don\'t blame missing a score on \"Jerry\'s numbers were wrong\". Yesterday\'s result does nothing to indicate that was the case. Blame it on the misguided expectation, when handicapping, that the fastest horses in the past are going to be the fastest horses in the future. And \"arahia\", if you are going to insist on posting a moronic taunt like you did, at least try to get your facts somewhere within the bounds of reality.
Jim
Jim, always good to hear from you, and it would be nice if all the Raggies were as intellectually honest and open minded as you.
Losing a bet doesn\'t mean anyone is \"wrong\". I just did the race, and you were right about Gun Runner, I gave him a new top of a couple of points.
And for those using either (or any other) data who projected a forward move and cashed Arrogate, good for them, but I don\'t care whose figures you use, none could be used to project the figure he ran or anything close to it.
Jimmy
I was stating facts every SHEET player i know (and i know many) did score big on the TRAVERS.
So you use RAGS and before the race given the #s, odds, post and patterns of Arrogate and Gunrunner you thought the value was Gunrunner from post 14.
We all can say whatever we want after the race but the fact remains
Arrogate was a toss on THOROS and a very strong play on the RAGS.
And IF YOU LOOK CAREFULLY at every horse\'s LAST RACE Arrogate was second fastest TO throw out EXAGERATOR on the RAGS.
Good luck at the races
I think you\'re probably right. Even Vito hit this one and I think that is the first pre-race pick that I\'ve ever seen him hit on. This one must have been obvious on their sheets.
i don\'t believe it was a slam dunk pick on rags. i do believe that many of them had Arrogate. Vito posted it, Hardoon picked it ,but Cartouche had Arrogate 3rd. I\'d like to see them post the sheets for the race.
The issue of course is to get more accurate figures than the other bettors going in. With more accurate figures we stand the best chance to calculate the probabilities of the various possible outcomes based on past performance and other factors,including form cycle, trainer, race shape, jockeys, bias, etc. But it all starts with accurate figures, which is why i have been buying TG for 25 years.
I posed the question about Arrogate\'s figures because on a relative basis, TG had him slower than some other figures widely available. The fact that Arrogate won doesn\'t mean TG was wrong, but it raises the question why the figures were, on a relative basis, different from the others.
i don\'t follow California but i see that Arrogate ran against older horses out there (only Connect did among the other Travers runners) and that Kristo, whom Arrogate beat in his last race before the Travers, was 2-1 in the $100k Brubaker and ran second to this year\'s Iselin winner in June.
Short fields, blow outs and the lack of two-turn races out there make it tough, not to mention the few points of common reference with east coast horses.
However, we east coasters need to know. After all, California horses took the exacta in the Derby, 1st and 3rd in Preakness, the Haskel exacta, the King\'s Bishop and the Travers exacta. Then there\'s Songbird. These California horses are feasting in the 3 year old races, and like the rest of us, i am just trying to get a good handle on them.
Arrogate\'s sheet on Rags: 10, 7+, 7+, 6+
On Rags he had one of the better sheets in the race, and was a definite win contender.
I monitor both figs from time to time, and this is the RARE race where I think Rags was better than TG.
For reference, what was Exaggerator\'s Preakness figure?
Jake will post the Travers sheets before he\'ll post the three months overdue Belmont figures, for whatever reason.
The cult/fundamentalist aspect of this, which I discussed with Rocky a couple of weeks ago, is really fascinating. Miff had it right with Kool Aide.
Or, those Japanes soldiers hiding in the forest for years because they didn\'t know the war had ended...
I mean, we are transparent, the other guys are the Kremlin, they cut off all discussion and disagreement. And the cult blindly accepts it. Fascinating.
I don\'t know what the competitor\'s numbers look like, but I\'m surprised it hasn\'t been brought up that Arrogate\'s triple pair up all took place as the only two turn race of the day on the day they were run. Not uncommon on that coast, and becoming more common on this side as well. Anyway, I\'m guessing services that don\'t change track speed for two turn races will have had him faster.
I did have two questions for TG surrounding this regarding Arrogate and My Man Sam. As My Man Sam\'s last race was the only two turn race of that day, a neck loss to 4yo Tale of Verve. Were the numbers given to Arrogate and My Man Sam for each of their last races tied to prior performances? Arrogate already had a pair of numbers to tie to, and My Man Sam came back to his Blue Grass number.
Gerard-- All figures are based on previous figures, there\'s no other way to do it (see \"Changing Track Speeds\" in the Archives section). And in one of my first posts after the race I mentioned the 3 horse field, and the inherent uncertainty that comes with less data points to work with.
Having said that, I since went back and looked at the 8/4 race. Winner (Arrogate) went forward 9 points next out, second horse went back 5 (at 2-1 in a stake), so there are no conclusions about that race to be drawn from their next performances. (Only other runner went back 11 points that day and hasn\'t come back, but off that pattern his next won\'t tell you anything).
Thank you.
I just want to double check my skills or lack of. I went with My Man Sam as a key in the Travers. I put his Bluegrass number close to Brody\'s Cause which was a 3(in the archives). MMS had the 14 hole, broke out and then straight over to the rail being my reasoning. I\'m not arguing his number, I\'m just asking if he had been given a 3 for the Bluegrass, can I then justify giving him the same 3 for the allowance on July 23rd? That\'ll be my last question.
I guess I understand all the vitriol between the 2 camps but both are responsible for feathering the others nest. Without them what kind of value would you get and vice versa? I wish you\'d encourage more people to buy their product.
Figures aren\'t made based on one number or one horse.