BJ and Tegger,

Thanks for the comments and questions.

Keep in mind that this model is a work in progress. Overall, the model's odds-line has been fairly accurate (e.g., a projected 5-1 shot wins about as often as a 5-1 shot should) but I am sure that it is far from perfect and produces some occasional bad numbers. My fellow collaborator and I (actually, he has done most the work) continue to make enhancements as we do more research and test things out. That being said, I agree with you that Raging Fever seemed more likely to win than the odds-line would indicate.

Of course, after the race the winner almost always looks obvious.

From the model's point of view (and mine for the most part since, to some extent, the model just quantifies my own opinion of each horse), Raging Fever was vulnerable. At the weights, there were 4 other horses just about as fast going into the race. She appears to be a better sprinter than router and she also appears to be a need-the-lead type (at least going into the race she did) and she was stretching out an extra 1/16 of a mile after carving out fast fractions under similar conditions and tiring. She is fast and consistent but she had run a long string of consecutive good races and looked like she might be tailing off a bit.

If, she did rate, she was likely to lose some ground from her outside post although this was not that much of a factor given the 1-turn nature of the race.

Finally, add to all that a few other slower horses in the race with an outside shot to run a big race such as Happily Unbridled, Two Item Limit and Too Scarlet.

If you toss all that into the hopper and crunch the numbers, it's not that surprising to see Raging Fever rated at a little under 5-1. Maybe it was a little high but she was still likely an underlay at the post-time odds.

Of course, she did win the race but it was hard to anticipate that she would rate off the pace (at least it was for me) and slow down from a 1:09.4 6f time in her last race over the same surface to something closer to 1:10.4. Even so, the hard-charging Transcendental was beaten less than a length and probably ran a faster figure and that was just one possible race scenario. In fact, a very favorable scenario for Raging Fever. Now imagine that she goes straight to the lead as she typically does (a more likely scenario). Do you think she would still have won?

What if Shiny Band had paired her last or Mystic Lady or Critical Eye had run back to their tops? They did not but there certainly was a chance that they might have done so.

Finally, what if Raging Fever simply ran an off race? Obviously, she did not but there was a chance that she might.

The Monte Carlo model runs the race thousands of times to see who wins under all sorts of possible scenarios by assigning different probabilities to the various possible outcomes. It is almost impossible to factor all of these "conditional" probabilities into an accurate odds line without the help of a computer and sometimes the results are not that intuitive.

This model is still a work in progress but I think we are definitely heading in the right direction. We have had some short term success with it but only time will tell if we can use it to beat this game in the long run, which is all that really counts.

Chris