A few things--

1-- We used to give live Derby and BC seminars, they are labor intensive and involve renting a room, finding a place with adequate parking, etc. We reach an awful lot of people much easier with the web seminars, and that's where our potential customers are these days as well. And there's not much overhead, or additional work, since I have to write those paragraphs anyway (which is brutal for the BC, not so bad for the Derby/Oaks).


2-- Bellamy Road's GP race came on a day when the track was steadily getting much faster throughout, and was in the middle of the card. I added a lot compared to races before it, but not nearly as much as I did to the later races, so no, I didn't break it out. My guess is that Beyer did it as a straight-up split variant, attaching that race to the later ones, splitting them from the earlier ones.

As an aside, I've never seen anything like these two new Magna tracks (GP and LRL). They are unbelievably changeable without precipitation, on a regular basis, which presumably means they are extremely sensitive to changes in moisture content (humidity, wind and sun, track maintenance), and therefore presumably have some different kind of soil content.

3-- On the Bandini question from a couple of days ago-- incremental moves are fine, but they don't go on indefinitely, and there are a lot more horses who can handle a 6 without bouncing than a 3, etc. Additionally, Pletcher horses don't generally develop through a campaign, they show what they've got early on-- and since this one was slower than several others and starting outside he was tough to like.

CH, if you post any pace or bias nonsense in response to this very specific question and response it will be deleted.

4-- Chris-- since it will be THE question for this year's Derby, how about a study of how horses ran coming in off big new tops. When we put out the sheets for the probables there will be a lot of noise, and I might post the full sheets for some of the preps so you can see how we got there. It's unnerving to be giving out all these negatives, but when horses run 4 to 9 points better than anyone else in the race, there ain't a whole lot of choice-- as you will see.



TGJB