Likelihood of winning the Derby

[Dunbar]

Originally Posted by The Indomitable DrugS

I gave the field a 16% chance of winning - not 5%.

Some of the field horses had percentages by them.

Huh? That's exactly what I said you did. I used the figure 16.83% for what you gave Pool 2's "All Others".

I wrote:

Originally Posted by Dunbar

If we assume all 5 of the non-Pool2 horses in your list make it to the Derby, you give them a 11.83% combined chance to win. Adding your 5% for "The Rest" brings it up to 16.83%.

And IMO your 16.83% for the Pool 2 Field is 5-10% short.

I don't have any reason to think that you've capped your five Pool 2 field horses incorrectly. So I attributed the shortfall to what you called "The Rest", suggesting that 10-15% would be a better fig than 5%. (That would have brought the total chance for the Pool 2 Field up to around 22-27%.) I shoulld more broadly have written that somewhere among your five Pool 2 field horses AND "The Rest" there is a 5-10% shortfall predicted by the number and quality of Pool 2 "All Others" horses that have made it to the Derby starting gate the past 11 years.

There are 300+ horses nominated to the TC. Some that are obscure at the time of past Future Wagers have suddenly become major players in the Derby. It's hard to put a figure on the Field's chances any other way than looking at historical data.

I'm sure someone else could look at it differently, but I feel pretty confident in the way I'm looking at it.

--Dunbar