Jerry,

Good for you for egging me on. Too bad I'm not going to bite -- much.

I will say this in response.

First -- the 'slide': The only thing revealed by the 13th race discussion was that you have a tremendous ability to not admit that you are wrong, no matter how glaring the facts -- Ragozin 'blew' the 13th race, they did route/sprint variant split, there was an 8 point variant change after the Preakness in the opposite direction of the trend during the day, etc.

Adjusting the variant for a drying surface is something that, to my knowledge, Ragozin never denied doing when conditions are appropriate.

Second, seems like there is a good argument they got the 2000 Wood right given that FP paired up in the Derby and bounced in the Preakness and later went through that supposedly ridiculously fast Wood number in the Jerome that fall.

To your questions:

1) I don't know. I don't work there. For good background, though, 'The Odds Must Be Crazy' is a good read.

Re: The Peter Pan, in general you don't need to fudge anything other than the variant. From what I can tell, in most races you have a horse that is a key 'pair up' or 'move forward'. You project ahead of time the number that horse will run and then, after seeing the time, key the variant to whatever that horse was projected to run.

Keep in mind that you and Rag. probably agree on 80-90% of the numbers out there (within a point or so) -- with the caveat that the TG scale is 2-3 points faster. If you are wrong on a race it will initially appear as an abberation in a horse's pattern. The pattern will collapse only when you are wrong repeatedly on races in which a particular horse runs. Then the numbers for those horses would appear to drift out of a reasonable range. But being 'wrong' on 3 of a horse's numbers would occur only 8/1000s of the time (assuming that Rag. and TG agree 80% of the time) and one in 1000 times if Rag. and TG agree 90% of the time.

Again, this kind of debate isn't helpful, in my view. Your position is that pretty patterns prove that you are right and Ragozin is wrong. I'll leave it to the readers of this board to decide whether that passes the smell test or not.

2a) Like I have been saying, I would look at similar repeatable conditions in the past and for times that are now appearing to be getting faster or slower than the expected time for the type of animal running. Then it's a question of judgment. There's no way to know for sure (I admit figure making is not an exact science) but you can get a decent directional on the variant that way.

2b)No. See above.

Re: your last post -- For all the reasons stated above and as evident by the fruitlessness of prior discussions, I'm not going to act as your errand boy on this. I would prefer to be forward looking (e.g., the handicapping contest with HP).