The following was sent to me by Roger Neubauer. It’s from a book by Henry Kuck, and while I have no opinion about Mr. Kuck’s figures, his comments are certainly intelligent.

- TGJB


The logic of the daily variant is that conditions change only once a day—before the races start and remain essentially the same until the next day. But that almost never happens. The obvious example is the rain that arrives half-way through a card. Conditions change at once. Standard theory then offers two variants for the day, one for the dry track and one for the wet. But this adaptation still will not do. If rain starts before the fifth race and continues through the ninth, is the track surface the same for race nine as for race five? Hardly. The track surface has become much wetter after a couple of hours of rain. A single variant for those later races can not encompass the effects of such change.

Carry the reasoning a step further and the full extent of the problem becomes clear. Are conditions for the eight race on this rainy day the same as for the ninth, run a half hour later? Not after another half hour of rain. And maybe the last half hour of rain dumped as much water on the track as came down in the previous two hours. How can a single variant number for all these races accurately express the effect of that rain on running times? It can not. The single variant simply means that the later part of the card was affected, on average, by a certain number of fifths and that every one of those later race times should be adjusted by the same number. The shortcomings of that approach should now be obvious. Conditions were not the same for each race and a single variant fails to accommodate reality.

The part of the problem involving a sloppy track should be recognized as a separate group, but not ONLY as a group. Those races also must be examined individually. Individual race analysis requires a great deal of skill and experience but is indispensable to truly accurate variants. The running times of each race and the horses who performed in those races must be thoroughly evaluated before adjusting final times. It can be done with precision but it requires special knowledge and great care.

But is the same kind of knowledge and care necessary for the earlier races on the same card? After all, they were run over a dry, fast track, not one affected by a continuing rain. Most speed figures simply arrive at a single variant for the fast-track races and leave it al that, assuming conditions were identical for those races. But were they?

The unhappy truth is that conditions for a given race are not necessarily the same as for any other race on the same card, no matter what the track condition might be. Even without rain, running times fluctuate according to the influences of track maintenance procedures, wind, temperature and more. In short, it is never safe to assume that circumstances for one race are the same as for the next, even when both are run at the same distance under what appear to be identical conditions. CONDITIONS MIGHT BE SIMILAR, BUT NOT NECESSARILY IDENTICAL. And when dealing with fifths of a second it takes only the slightest change in conditions to affect running times.

Here is an example. It is a windy day. A thoughtful person knows that wind will affect running times. So the wind speed and direction are checked before post time. It is know to be blowing out of the west at fifteen miles per hour. Careful research shows that such a wind might slow running times by two-fifths of a second in a six-furlong race. The starting gate opens and, at that very instant, the wind gusts. For the next twenty seconds or so it hits the horses in the face. The gust is clearly stronger than fifteen miles per hour during those seconds, but how much stronger? The horses should be slowed during this part of the race, but by how much? And if the wind gusts again when the field turns into the stretch, how much faster will it cause the horses to run? Does the wind at their backs nullify the effects of the wind in their faces?

While these questions about wind might seem like unnecessary hair splitting, it must be remembered that splitting hairs is what handicapping is all about. To be satisfied with a single daily variant is to settle for half a loaf. The whole loaf is within reach.

A one-fifth second edge is substantial for any horse. An average daily variant fails to reveal that kind of advantage as often as it actually occurs. Individual race variants do much better.

Individual race variants start with the assumption that conditions can and of the do vary from ace to race, and not just once a day. While conditions might be identical from one race to the next, only an analysis of each race combined with an overview of all races on the card, can lead to the best final-time variants. And those best variants provide the most precise means of evaluating race performance.