Jim--

1-- No, I don't think most sheet players go back and check for accuracy-- in fact, most Ragozin players don't come on the internet, so they have no way of comparing. I wish they did. But I don't think it's true that people make decisions strictly on the basis of results, either. Peer pressure and comfort zones have a big effect-- some of us recall how hard a time the Racing Times had in getting DRF readers to switch. Ultimately, the DRF pretty much became the RT. Hypothetical-- if you did an IQ test, how do you think RT and DRF customers would have stacked up? Why?

And by the way, I don't think Ragozin players are dumb. There are other things at work here.

2-- The point about mistakes (and I'm not talking about judgement calls here) in big races is that they tell you about the level of accuracy of the data in general, and give you a means to evaluate all the claims the owners of the company make. These are the biggest races of the year, and we're talking about outright screwups, followed by the reaction we've come to expect from the Ragozin office-- stonewalling, not fixing the mistakes. As Mike said earlier in a different context, there is a credibility issue here-- you guys are paying money for data, and are dependent on us to do our job so that you DON'T have to check everything.

It should be obvious that if there are mistakes like these on days like these, there are many, many more during the year. Without doubt, some of those have cost customers money. And a point or two difference within a horse's pattern could certainly affect the "condition" reads that Friedman is always talking about. In case it's not already clear, I think that making fine line reads off data as grossly innacurate as theirs is a joke.

3-- Aside from being in business long before us, Len "computerized" long before we did-- we had a hand written product until 1994. So when we first got a website (1997), Len probably outsold us about 3 or 4-1. As far as we can tell, he now might outsell us 3/2. It's tough to know, since we don't know his on-line sales, and since 2/3 of ours are on-line. We do virtually no marketing in the field, meaning with those who buy hard copy-- we don't give seminars any more, we have only one field op (Bill Spillane), who only spends maybe 50 days a year at tracks. Ragozin has several full time field ops.

But there are other reasons as well. Aside from peer pressure and comfort, there are psychological factors-- and as someone who might have been the most successful there was at using Ragozin data, I know it well. You become invested-- you want to believe the data is infallible, and you don't want to believe the score you made on a "pattern read" might have been lucky. In the end this is a game of probability-- you have to do a lot of things right to win. Ragozin's data certainly helped me-- but so did the fact that no one else had figures back then, that I knew what I was doing, and I worked my ass off. It took me quite a while to realize this-- until long after I left that office.

4-- Again-- we are not picking winners in ROTW (and I'm not not even writing it these days, by the way). We are trying to teach people how to use the data. ROTW has no other function, and the only way to really test it would be to go back and make an odds line based on the comments, look at what the horses went off at, and see how you would have done betting the overlays over a long period.

But that's not the test of the data. The tests are a) does the internal logic hold up, b) is it relatively accurate for what it is supposed to be, and c) does it work for you. If you really have not looked at Ragozin, you owe it to yourself to check it out and compare-- I'm not worried about what you will find. But at the end of the day, this is a tough game with a lot of randomness in it-- even the best data is just part of beating a game with a tough takeout.



TGJB