I am a SHEET user but have look at your product from time to time over the years and more so lately. I have always been questionable about your #\'s becuase of how almost every horse in every race seems to be of equal ability with just as good of a chance to run the same # as the others. Also I have seen some horses run the same # 3,4 times in a row which makes me really questions the #\'s and say \" could a horse run the same exact effort 3,4 times in a row? But now that I have been analyzing the #\'s with more intesity and watching the races I think I realize that there isn\'y a whole lot in terms of lenghts/speed that seperates many horse in a race. Would this be a good assumption? Maybe you could elborate some more.
Thanks.
I will chime in a little bit here on a non-sheet related response.
The sport is designed to bring together in each race horses who are closely aligned in ability. The list of proposed upcoming races is called the condition book. The reason is that \"conditions\" are the filters that set forth horses\' eligibility to run in each race. There are many different sorts of conditions/filters (age, sex, state of breeding, number of wins, horse\'s value, owner\'s willingness to put up money to enter, differing assigned weights), but the entire point of all of them is to make open and competitive races....because that is what makes people interested in betting....and ....without betting...there are no races. So, by design, the races are supposed to be evenly matched.
Beau--
1-- Yes, people don\'t usually realize how evenly matched these races are.
2-- Part of the reason people think we pair up a lot is the layout of our product-- we don\'t graph as much laterally as the other guy.
3-- But yes, horses do run in a tighter range on TG than on other figures. As those who have made figures themselves know, that is a sign of accuracy-- the way we all make figures is by trying to match up what they do today with figures they have run in the past. If you have lots of horses in a race running close to what they have in the past, it\'s a sign both the past and present figures are correct. This is something you can\'t do artificially-- the relationship (in figure terms) between horses in a race is fixed by their beaten lengths, weight, and ground loss. This means that you can start out by pairing up one horse, but then the others won\'t fall in line unless you have it right.