1-- Tony, put them all in one post next time. And you don't have to look at the study. As I have said repeatedly, this is NOT supposed to replace handicapping. You seem not to understand at all what we are trying to do.

We are trying to take the judgment (handicapping) OUT, and create a purely mechanical system that will check accuracy, not in individual cases, but in the long run. If you think you can come up with a simple system that will correlate better with the results of races cough it up-- I'll bet you sight unseen you can't, having spent a lot of time thinking about this. I could go through some individual examples to show why this is the right way, but it would be a waste of my time. Just focus on this part-- in the Bellamy Road example that you used, and in all the others, IT'S THE SAME FOR BOTH SIDES-- it washes out in the long run.

2- David-- depends what you mean by tightness. If you mean we're more accurate, I obviously agree, and that would mean we would do better. If you mean figures in a tighter range, it's completely irrelevant-- the horses are ranked based on comparisons to others using the SAME set of figures,not the other guys. Doesn't matter at all.

3-- At the very least the study will be pushed back a week. Jimbo had to drop out (he's going to be out of the country for two weeks), and Tom and I have been unable to come to terms about how to proceed in his absence. In a perfect world, since Ragozin has the same chance to establish bragging rights from this as I do, Friedman would engage in the process here-- post their ratings and rankings every day, and e-mail me the underlying data so I could check it (and not have to pay for it), and we would do the same in the other direction so they could do the same. But I'm not holding my breath. I'm going to try to salvage this thing-- I can do it all here, with everything posted in advance publicly, and the underlying data available to anyone to check, but some yo-yo will still think (or claim) I rigged it. So I'm going to try to come up with a way where that can't be claimed.