Back from Saratoga, and there is lots of interesting stuff here which I will touch on briefly for now. Much of it will provoke more discussion, in a good way.
As for Beavis ("hehehe")-- you are harmless, so for the meantime we're going to continue to let you post, save for unusually obnoxious personal attacks such as the one Paul tells me he deleted (I was away). The Ragozin office sent me a telegram telling me how proud they are to have you as their ambassador here. Your stuff is very effective, don't let anybody tell you otherwise-- everyone here is just as dumb and childish as... well, hehehe.

Weight-- I too would like to see the Beyer/Hopkins study. As I said at the Expo (this part they didn't cut on the DVD), the way the game is structured makes it very hard to do a study, because horse are assigned more weight when they are in form.

Ground loss-- all else aside (since there is no way to argue with "I have done well by doing..."), the issue brings up something else I went into at Vegas. If one horse beats another by 7 lengths, but he ran on the "better" part of the track, the 7 lengths could be considered misleading-- but we still want the DRF to tell us how many lengths the horse was beaten. Likewise, it is better to know how far each horse travelled-- if you want to adjust for "better" parts of the track, have fun.

Betting strategy-- as I have said before, the trick is to have your bets as closely as possible express your handicapping opinion. This is not nearly as easy or simple as it sounds, and the easiest way to do this is to actually ask yourself the question "What do I like about this race?", and articulate an answer in a full sentence. Try it-- if you actually can do it, you will find that the answer should pretty well define your bet. More to come on this, and if I have time I might do what jwo7 asked, for the Saturday Sar card-- not just because I had a big day, but because it was a result more of effective betting than of handicapping. The two things that have improved my game over the last few years are using the new data, and making more focused plays. Meanwhile, anyone interested should go to the betting pointers Alan mentioned.

TimeForm/performance figures/speed figures-- as George touched on, very few races in Europe are truly run-- many are the equivalent of our "pace" races. Since they don't give fractional times (which would be pretty much meaningless anyway, given the varying configurations), this means pretty much cutting loose every race.

Classhandicapper is right on two fronts-- one is that I do disagree with some of what he is saying. But only as to some of the details-- I do agree that various elements affect the final time (see "pace" races, which are extreme cases), especially when you are talking about small differences. We are trying to come up with figures that best reflect the performances of the horses, as we do with the "pace" races. As far as I know, I was the one who coined the term "performance figures" when I did Post Time in 92-93. But I could be wrong.



TGJB