Assuming your turf variants are derived by keying in on horses with established turf
form/numbers do you approach your off track variants the same way by zeroing in on
horses with establihed wet lines?
This is the first time I\'ve been asked this. No, I don\'t focus on previous off track numbers, and in general don\'t make as much of a distinction between off and dry tracks as others do, both in making figures and using them (which is not to say that I don\'t make any).I don\'t know whether track composition or maintenance have changed since the pre- TG era, or whether advances in shoeing have changed things, or whether other figure makers overstated the effects of off tracks then (at least one hedges those days still as a matter of course, giving out bad numbers and then suggesting you ignore them), but I find that off tracks hold together pretty well, with the races making sense if you treat it like just another day. A slightly larger than usual number of horses run x\'s, but in general it\'s about the same % of new tops, old tops, and a couple of points off the tops.