Watched Flower Alley work this morning

[Rupert Pupkin]

Originally Posted by oracle80

Fine, then hes in a slump, do you not go against guys in a slump as a rule???

I wouldn't even call it a slump. I would call it a short-term fluctuation. Sure he is only 1 for 16, but he has five 2nd place finishes and a few 3rd place finishes. He's a 20% trainer, so you would expect him to have 3 wins from his 16 starts. He only has 1 win, so he has 2 less wins than he should. That's not really a big deal. That kind of thing happens all the time. A 20% trainer will not win with 2 out of every 10 starters in the short-run. there will be all kinds of fluctautions. He may win 4 out of 10 and then go 0 for his next 10. But in the long-run he will win 20% which is 2 out of 10.

If I flip a coin right now 100 times, it would not be surprising if there are periods where heads comes up 4 times in a row. That would not be unusual. The only thing that would be unusual would be if one side came much more than the other side over time. If I flipped the coin 1000 times and heads came up 600 times, you would know that there is something wrong with the coin.

But if I flipped a coin only 10 times and one side came up 7 times, I wouldn't assume that there was anything wrong with the coin. I would just assume that it was a short-term fluctuation