In last year's seminar TGJB sang the praises of paired tops coming into the Derby and raised doubts about horses coming in off tops marking three points or more of improvement. Left undiscussed, at least directly, was the virtue of small new tops (between 1 and 3 points).

In this week's ROTW, there was a discussion of small tops often being a harbinger of even more improvement to come. Also, in last year's Derby seminar, Commanding Curve was highly touted and was coming in off a top of less than 3 points.

My own limited analysis of the Derby archives suggests that a small new top in the last pre-Derby start is preferable even to a paired top in that race (with similar percentages of tops and pairs, but a smaller percentage of X's). That would make sense not only because of the point made in the ROTW analysis, but also because the last race is often the first stretch-out to 9 furlongs. Since the TG scale is relative, it would make sense that a horse who is going to move up relative to others at 10 furlongs, should also do so (perhaps to a lesser extent) on the stretch-out from 8.5 to 9.