Miff-- Beyer (who at this point is the only other American figure maker I know of worth talking about in terms of judging track speed) has HL running 13 points faster, or 4 of our points. In other words, we both came to the conclusionthat the track changed speed quite a bit-- just disagreed about how much.

CTC-- While the track was at its slowest for the maiden claimer, it was still much slower after that, compared to the first three races. Nobody hung anything on one maiden claimer. But there was enough historical data in that race to come up pretty tight with a figure, and most definitely enough to know it didn't make any sense at all to use the variant from the earlier races.

Jim-- I've gone through this before, but the way to do this is not by looking at each horse and deciding whether it's possible for them to have run the worse figure. It's by looking at each horse and seeing what the percentage chance is of them running in different ranges, and one of the quicker ways to do that is with the Thoro-Patterns. But in this case, just look at what percentage of each horse's figures are 3 or more points off their tops, historically-- and then think about the percentage chance of so many doing it.

Just to give you an idea-- if it's 50% for one horse to run that bad (it's not), it would be just over 6% for only 4 horses to do it. And the same goes the other way-- if it's 30% for each horse to run a paired or new top (it's actually higher), the mathematical chance for only one of 11 to do it is very small (Jimbo showed the formula for that one around BC time).