I think there is tons of value in these thoro patterns, but messing around a bit with them its clear you have to evaluate each case pretty closely.

For example, yesterdays stake at churchill downs. The two best horses were Shocanage and Delta Princess. Both had run pretty consistenly around 4-5, but both horses had some odd ball top of around 0. So their thoro patterns where x-x-x and off-off-off and the chances of even repeating a pair or new top were 6% and 26%, but if you throw out the suspicous figure they have healthy patters.

I guess the question is do the experts make that same reasoning that I did or do you look to play against?