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Originally Posted by VOL JACK
BTW, please take a look at the last race of sweet ferver and Any Limit. THEY RAN EQUAL TIMES! With very similar fractions and track variance. Sweet Ferver was given a 90 BSF and Any Limit was given a 105. How can this be explained? Sweet Ferver proved the beyers wrong yesterday IMO. Too bad I got wrapped up in Stormy Kiss. LOL. Thanks for your insight.
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Well, Sweet Fervor ran on January 28th and Any Limit ran on February 17th so I can't compare the actual final times at all. As far as what happened yesterday, I guess Sweet Fervor improved off her first race, and probably appreciated the extra half a furlong, and Any Limit probably regressed a tad and didn't appreciate the added ground.
Specifically on the Any Limit fig, it always seemed high to me, and specifically I had a problem with the third finisher running a career high especially with the reasonable amount of trouble she encountered on the turn. There are often problems with figs where the fields are significantly gapped out, as they were in the Hurricane Bertie, with the top two finishers finishing over eight lengths ahead of the third placed horse. I don't make figs, and don't believe it's too fair to criticize those that do, but I talked about this number with Beyer before the race, and also about the problems making numbers in fields that gap. It feels like intellectually the numbers in these races need to be compressed but the problem with that is it does not offer a true indication of every horse's final time. Thus, I don't have an answer.
To be honest, and I don't mean this to point a finger at you, but I think it is every horseplayer's responsibility to make their own determination about any number they use. If you use them blindly, without taking other factors into account, in my opinion you are asking for trouble. I use them as a very vague guide, and always look at outlying high or low figures carefully, like Any Limit's surprising 105, and attempt to make my own determination about whether or not they seem aberrational and why. Considering Any Limit dueled hard for the lead that day, and had never run that kind of number, I did not particularly believe in its predictive powers. I hardly think that was a surprising conclusion.
The bottom line? Do ALL the required work.