Derby Week wrap up

[FrankD.]

A hectic and frantic week of hardcore gambling ended with a popular and logical conclusion to the biggest race of the year. Congrats to Shug and the Janney/Phipps connections; lifer\'s who have done it correctly as sportsmen.

Personally it was a very up and down week that ended up in the red (not red board)
for a few dollars. The juices were flowing and the handle was churning with a couple of close what ifs!!!

I\'ve been quiet (for me) on the board all week as I watched and read in amazement string after string of non thoro graph related, red boarding, personal attacks, know it all\'s and a lot of general BS.None of which was backed up by anything logical, figure related or anything germane to what a serious everyday horse player would deem relevant.

I\'ve been a contributing member of this elite group of T-generates for about 5 years; a period in which I\'ll admit to learning more than I had in the previous 35. The seminars, private emails, texts and phone calls with some of the sharpest people in the game, most of whom churn a steady profit have been a wild ride. The friendships, testicle busting and pleasure of becoming associated with a group of very interesting folks to say the least has been a blast.

No doubt that Derby or Triple Crown fever brings the bears out of hibernation and the lunatics out of the asylum. This Derby week seemed to take the cake!!!!

TGJB it\'s your sandbox; I urge you to do some spring cleaning and please set some discussion parameters without banning free speech.

Come on guy\'s !!!
It\'s a forum for serious players and those who love the game. If I were a novice getting my feet wet in this arena the past week or so, I would have to question why I would want any involvement in such a freak show???

This board is a special place; you never know who is offering an opinion; it\'s frequented by some major players in the industry from all corners.

Five more weeks of controlled lunacy I hope gets us through the Triple Crown and a mere 75 days to opening day at the Spa.

Clean it up here!!!!

Good luck,

Frank D.

[catcapper]

I have been using TG figs for a year and a half to great success, though this is my first post. I just started reading the forum about a month ago. I thought, perhaps one day,I might contribute something meaningful to this top notch discussion. It was great reading and I felt I learned a lot. And it was refreshing to listen to good minds discuss racing. Unfortunately, I agree that it quickly degenerated into a pee pee contest gone bad. And it was too tedious to read through petty sniping to find the nuggets that are there. I also noticed that a few of the posters that most impressed me stopped posting.

To TGJB, thank you for your devotion to this sport and your fearless tenacity. Perhaps you could tie participation in the board to purchase of the product.

And thank you to FrankD for his posting. I heartily concur.

If I post again, it will be to share something useful and meaningful.

And I will be reading everyday anyway.

[belmont3]

Frank,

Nice to see you come out of your Adirondack hibernation. .  
About 75 days until opening day at the SPA....so fatten up your bankroll.
Hope to be a more frequent visitor this summer as my youngest daughter Madeleine now demanding a full week in Saratoga rather than a weekend. Maddie apparently is well bred and on the right training regimen! And I did not need a \'super\' vet or any PEDs. . Planning two weeks and one other arbitrary weekend.
Frank, all kidding aside, thank you for your very succinct post.
I noticed as well that many of the forum \'heavyweights\' (you are included LOL) did not weigh in for the big event. Lots of clutter. Time for a \'garbage\' sale perhaps.

[TGJB]

Cicadas in the news these days, not the great mare, bugs. Seems they wait underground, then come out every 17 years.

Hell, we get\'em every spring. Chuckles comes to mind...

[PapaChach]

Our collection of friends had the usual Derby Day party, unbelievable food and tons of booze, pooled our dough, I got tasked with coming up with the syndicate play. We skipped the preminaries when the track came up sloppy (none of us are mudders) and Covello\'s piece and Point of Entry scratched out of the turfer, leaving it unbettable vertically (none of us had time to look enough at the prior races to come up with a pick, which was fortunate because they all liked the Ramsey thing that won the filly race, I didn\'t, at all).

The TG mentality must have sunk in at this point because before I even bought the race I liked Orb, Normandy Invasion, and IMLD, though I felt shaky about the latter getting ten. Felt even better after reading the numners and TGJB\'s comments and keyed the three of them on top in tris over a bunch, heavier w/Orb and NI, unfortunately Golden Soul wasn\'t one of them. Early on I had considered him as I always try to throw one in underneath who makes no sense because this seems to happen often enough in this race, but tossed.

Pretty disappointed because I thought Revolutionary was a horrendous favorite (I got our plays in a little early and he was 5-1 fave when I did) and that the money he was taking made logical horses nice overlays. Our biggest play was good-sized exacta box w/NI and Orb and when NI swept to the lead at the 1/4 pole thought for a sec we might get everything. I was even more excited \'cuz NI\'s trainer hails from same (miniscule) hometown I do; when he hit the front I semi-drunkenly started screaming \"WE REPRESENTIN\' THE 6-6-4\" (back in the days of land lines, 664 was the front end of every phone number in town), much to the amusement of the assembled crowd. Alas, it was not meant to be, though I wonder what-if, had NI made the move a smidge later.

Party host, my best friend, refuses to bet win bets in syndicate situations; \"we can bet $40 to win on 6-1 shots 364 days a year,\" he says, and I suppose he has a point. I actually asked for permission to dutch $60 win bets on NI and Orb on my own account, and he said to go ahead, so I did, and I won about $5.80 on the race.

Given the potentially enervating effects of the track condition and the possibility that rider mis-timed move on NI, might be interested on betting him back next time out, which I presume will be the Belmont. Hopefully Orb wins in Balty and goes 4/5 in NYC which might make the proposition worthwhile.

Been a daily reader of this board for more than a dozen years, initially as kingpost and then as PapaChach. Around the time I started reading here, I also participated in a board on the Bloodhorse site. The latter got assasinated by assinity and I\'ve since marveled that this place has managed to avoid the same dismal fate as that place.

The last ten days or so may have been the first time in all those years that I started to think, yeah, I guess this place is finally going down the crapper, too.

I don\'t post here much, because I know enough to know I don\'t have that much to add; there are people here well more versed in figure handicapping, and/or more talented at writing, than I. Put me on a board dealing with current politics, colonial-era American history, or what they still sometimes call indie-rock and you couldn\'t shut me up, but around here, I remember what my father always told me: when you\'re around people who know more about what you\'re talking about that you do, shut the hell up and listen.

Far be it from me to tell anyone how to run their bidness, but for the love of god, the kids pissing in the pool the last few days was a little disconcerting. Hope things get back to normal now that the Big Dance is over.

[moosepalm]

Well said, Papa, as was the case for those preceding you on the thread, starting with Frank D., who along with his Spa cellmate R-Bee, certainly have their avuncular moments.  Much of your \"game day\" experience mirrored my own, and we will forever ask the absolutely worthless question, \"what if?\" regarding NI\'s move.  And, as you do, I defer to those who know more, a gargantuan number, though some of the most knowledgeable keep their wisdom close to the vest.  As for the shenanigans of the past week, I see it as a parallel to the Derby experience itself, both in terms of the race and the surrounding experience, where chaos rules.  It is reminiscent of experiences I have on a football message board during a game in which the most innocuous of the local team\'s mistakes have dire consequences for the entire season.  Rational discourse takes a holiday.  During the first week of May, the moon, stars and tides all align, or misalign, to bring aberrant thought to the forefront.  I expect that the innkeeper will now do the necessary housecleaning to restore the acceptable level of inanity of our normal programming for the next fifty-one weeks.

[Rick B.]

PapaChach Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Far be it from me to tell anyone how to run their
> bidness, but for the love of god, the kids pissing
> in the pool the last few days was a little
> disconcerting. Hope things get back to normal now
> that the Big Dance is over.

Have faith. The TG crew was very busy last week,
and from the way Alan sounded on the radio Saturday
morning, he\'s either just getting healthy, or climbing
into a hospital bed about now.
 
A few squirts of Forum Formula 409 will clean things up.
Any man can put up with a little stench for a day or
two, but TGJB & crew keep things pretty tidy here, IMO.

[richiebee]

moosepalm Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Well said, Papa, as was the case for those
> preceding you on the thread, starting with Frank
> D., who along with his Spa cellmate R-Bee,
> certainly have their avuncular moments.  

Moose:

Certainly, you have taken a swipe at Uncles everyhere, but I agree that
the TG board during the Derby run up resembles the event itself, circus
like and chaotic.

JB has shown a tremendous tolerance for free speech on this board and I think
the reason is that he realizes that the true dunces eventually are exposed as
such and there is a certain entertainment value in that.

Just as an example, there was a certain poster who for the second straight year
showed animosity towards Covel and tried to disparage the Thorographic way of
looking at things.

As far as I could tell, this poster made no pre race selections of his own (I
may be wrong about this, I tend to just skim most of his posts) but at the end
of Derby Day informed that he had a very successful day and asked to \"Let
Bygones be Bygones.\"

If it were not for the colossal comic value of a post such as this, a redboard
of the most epic proportions, and a certain amount of sympathy for the poster,
I would say \"Let Bygones Begone.\"

On to Baltimore, where we can only hope for fast/firm, a full field, and a
little more chaos in the races leading up to the BIg Event.

[JimP]

\"JB has shown a tremendous tolerance for free speech on this board and I think
the reason is that he realizes that the true dunces eventually are exposed as
such\"

Then lets get Sighthound back. Certainly no dunce. More free speech.

[TGJB]

Re free speech-- having a wrong opinion here is not a problem, if it\'s presented as an opinion. Stating something as a) a fact b) that you are a credible source about, c) when (aside from being dead wrong) you have absolutely no factual basis for the statement d) about the most important issue facing the game, and the one I and others have been struggling to get fixed for years, is a whole different thing. She had lots of chances to fix the problem, and another to simply take the 3 months quietly. Ain\'t happening.

[JimP]

Thanks for the definition of free speech.

[TGJB]

You do understand this isn\'t the public square, right? And there are plenty of limits to speech even there.

It\'s pretty clear the problem here recently hasn\'t been my restricting people too much.

[JimP]

\"It\'s pretty clear the problem here recently hasn\'t been my restricting people too much.\"

One more comment and then I\'ll shut up and go back to lurking. It isn\'t that important to me. I agree that the problem isn\'t restricting people too much. I happen to think that the problem is restricting the wrong people. But it\'s your board so you can restrict as much or many as you want. Some restrictions just make the board less interesting IMHO. I thought Sighthound had many great insights on a variety of subjects. I wish I knew where she was posting now. I would be reading that site. And that\'s all I have to say on the subject.

[TGJB]

As I said after I banned her, I liked having Sight here too. That\'s why after saying I was banning her I cut it to three months. At which point she put up three posts, leaving me no choice.

I\'ve heard since then that she does have a history in other forums, maybe someone here can tell you where she\'s blasting me.

[moosepalm]

From my vantage point, it was both a problem of what was being said, and who was saying it.  If one of the hip shooters who had been spouting gibberish all week made similar unsubstantiated proclamations, we would have been filing them in the same refuse pile as all the other unvarnished bilge that was inflicted upon this board.  But, this was a licensed professional with a great deal of expertise who offered opinions on numerous subjects with ex cathedra bearing.  All well and good when it was well documented, but some of it wasn\'t, and distinctions were not made, in terms of presentation, about what was being substantiated and what wasn\'t.  So, it all mushed together as if it was fact, when at least a couple of things could not be known by virtually anyone with the kind of certitude with which it was being presented.  And when substantiation was repeatedly requested, it still was not provided.  A person with a certain expertise is held to higher standards than the rest of us who traffic in the everyday BS of the realm.  Was this a capital crime?  I\'m not close enough to the issue to weigh the merits, but I can certainly see why it would piss off someone who is.