Wide

Rich,

I know. Virtually everyone on both boards disagrees with me on that (except maybe the 1/4 point moves). I have less faith in the accuracy of everyone\'s speed figure making ability than that and enough faith in my subjective adjustments to the figures that change the patterns to think otherwise.

[bobphilo]

Class,

I see your points. I think I slightly misuderstood your earlier post re: dead rail vs. wide. I think what you were saying was , how does one know at what point the disadvantage of going wide makes up for the disadvantage of racing on a dead rail (whether it is extreme enough to be noted or not).
The short answer is you don\'t, in the sense that you can\'t build it into the figure. Ground loss is quantifiable and dead rails are not - even though they can vary in severity. Therefore you don\'t have 2 numbers to subtract one from the other.
However The same thing is also true of other factors. You also can\'t know how much a dead rail detracts from weight off. Somehow people don\'t ask that question because the answer is self-evident. Well it\'s the same with dead rail vs. wide.
I would say the only way you could roughly estimate the degree of differnce between btween saving ground on a dead rail vs. going wide is to observe whether the rail huggers or swoopers are doing better than expected on the day.
I don\'t think it would be worth the extra effort, rather than assuming, as I do, that if the rail is bad enough to counteract going wide, Jerry will note it.

Bob

[kev]

Not me, all you have to do is to look over alot of sheets and see those little moves. I print tons of sheets out and keep them on file, some being those little 1/2pt moves.