I posted this in responce to Alydar\'s 3,540th post on the Ragozin board taking a shot at me, and accusing me of ducking him, and it was deleted. So here it is, with minor editing.
Anyone who wants to know why Alydar was banned from this board need only look at what has happened on the Ragozin site over the last few months. On this site I had three choices--
1- respond to everything, which means a real lot (in his recent post on the Ragozin board he mentions that he sent me the first 3 of \"124 questions\"), and took up a lot of my time when I tried to do it here, since he appears to spend his whole day in front of a computer screen, and feels I am obligated to answer him whenever he wants, on any subject, and continue the conversation for as long as he wants, even if it means staying in the office all night,
2- let his endless stuff stand without rebuttal, which would make it appear I did not have an answer (which the Ragozin crew seeks to accomplish by taking down this and other responses to his comments and those of others on their board, while letting the comments stand), or
3- ban him. I chose this one.
When he started posting on the Ragozin board I didn\'t have the third option, so I had Hobson\'s choice. The situation was made worse in that he was known to use our data, so his appearing to switch (as far as I know he did not) gave the appearance of a judgement on the relative merits of the two products. It was not, it was personal-- so I set out to establish this and it required answering his posts to do so, which took an awful long time (and a lot of mine), and made us both look bad, and turned Ragozin\'s site into the dump this site would have become if I had let that stuff continue here. I pointed out several times along the way to both Friedman and Jake that if they deleted the attacks I would have no reason to protect my interests, but they didn\'t do so, leaving their site a real mess.
Anyway, they have now decided to go to a similar policy to the one we have here, and I am surprised it took so long. It will be interesting to see whether Alydar and others will continue to be allowed to lob grenades now that there will be no response available-- and it is important to note that no one has ever been deleted or banned on this site for JUST raising figure related or Ragozin/TG issues, no matter how contentious, and Alydar knows it. I have encouraged Friedman to post responses to me on our site many times (and have about as much chance of that happening as I do of him accepting one of my challenges to a handicapping contest), and also would point out that hundreds of times as many posts have been deleted on the other board as on this one.
So does this mean you\'re responding to the three questions or not?
Are they related to figure making?
If so, I assume they are adversarial, and since Alydar is certainly wrong on whatever he is asking about, it would be interesting to see you once again squash the opposition.
Regarding handicapping contests:
Try the Orleans tournament(s). Reportedly, Friedman likes to play in those. It may not be the perfect format, but with superior figures and skills, you should have little trouble dispatching of him, as most others there do.
I definitely will be responding to the questions, and may even get to them today or tomorrow, which is amazing considering all that is going on this week-- if not, it will be as soon after the Belmont as things die down, so everyone will pay attention. Only one of the questions is even remotely related to figure making, but I assume we will get to those over a period of time, and I will leave it to others to decide who gets the best of the back and forth, and to decide about far more important implications of the discussion.
As I said in a post on the subject on the other board, when I get my rare days off after working intensely, stressfully, with figures, day in and day out, the last thing I\'m going to do is go to a handicapping contest to sit in a room somewhere and do it some more, and waste time traveling to do so. I have had 5 days off since Feb 4th, but I am going away (to Ascot) later this month.
Friedman and I are both in New York, and even beyond that, a contest between us could easily take place here on the internet, where everyone could follow along daily, over a long period of time, and neither of us would have to miss any work-- this would have the advantage of giving BOTH companies the chance to develop new customers. My original proposal on this was to DRF when their site first went up, and Katherine Wilkens agreed to hold it there, and promote it.
Are you going to be at the OTB party Fri night?