As I said in an earlier post ("Question For Len", above), Hawthorne has been featuring some split variants recently, with no weather changes. Another occurred on the day of the Illinois Derby, and made for an extremely tough decision.

There were two ways you could do the race, and neither had anything to do with the other 3 routes on the day-- if you did it with them, the winner would get somewhere between negative 7 and negative 12, with the horses behind him also getting correspondingly crazy figures, 6 to 10 points faster than I gave them. I chose the way you will see below, with the alternative being to take off another 1 3/4 points. It's a very close call, as you will see-- and if you do it the other way SNS gets a neg 3, which is why I'm mentioning it.

I'm going to review the race as the horses come back, and it's not inconceivable that I change it before the Derby.

Meanwhile, it's worth noting that Ragozin did the race FOUR points faster than I did. Which almost certainly means he did all the routes together-- giving the other races lousy figures, and this one ridiculously fast ones.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 04/25/2006 07:06PM by TGJB.