Alydar/JB

I think we'redone with this one.

Too bad you guys can't just debate the merits and feel the need to fire personal insults in virtually every post. That's usually not a good sign for the merits of your argument.

The thing that takes out your response is your penchant for gross oversimplification and makes it impossible to have an intelligent discussion.

This is what you wrote: "Now let's say the numbers we had given these horses GOING IN TO today's race had been inaccurate. Let's say horse 5 had really been running 5s, horse 4 had been running 6s, and so on. The order of finish will be the reverse of the way I showed it above. What's your variant now? What happens to the tightness of the cycles?"

Like I said, there is no such thing as 'the numbers being inaccurate.' Your example assumes 100% inaccuracy for every horse. Your other example wasn't much better. My point from the beginning has been that on the margins TG is less useful because he manipulates the variant to achieve a tighter range of results. My estimate is that this happens about 20% of the time. I verified that by looking at several hundred results. No answer from you on this. Or on whether you actually believe JB's argument that a tight range of numbers proves that he is right and Ragozin is wrong.

Having 20% of your numbers be off a few points (assuming Ragozin is right 100% of the time, which he is not) does not cause a collapse of the sheet. It only causes an occasional anomaly.

Making figures is I agree a matter of judgment and interpretation. TG has claimed a lot more though -- "I'm always right because my cycles are tight"

In my view the TG bias toward forcing results to be 'tight' is why TG is not 'wrong' per se, but less useful. I have never claimed more than this point. Look back at my first post on May 23, which, by the way, was a response to JB's boast that Rag. got a bunch of races wrong on Preakness day and later had to backpedal like crazy.