I disagree with Beyer.

The reason that speed has been so great on traditional dirt tracks over the years is because of kickback. Who wants to handicap races trying to figure out which horses will get dirt in their faces and which ones will not? Thats not handicapping. Thats not handicapping the relative talents of the horses. Its handicapping the ability of each individual horse's mental makeup to be able to handle 'spray' in their face.

The reason Beyer is wrong is that he's not necessarily complaining about Polytrack, he's complaining about change. If things were reversed and polytrack is all we knew for 100 years and all of a sudden, Keeneland went to a dirt surface, Beyer would yell and scream about speed winning all the time. He's be mad that whoever got the lead would win. He'd say, "thats not handicapping"

Change is good. Great horseplayers adjust to change and the ones who can't, perish.

Handicapping is all about making adjustments on the fly. Its a great game of chess. The more 'unpredictable' the races are, the better chance we as horseplayers have to beat this game.

If everyone knows the winners, and the game gets easy, everyone will know the results in advance and no one will be able to make big money.

Throw a monkey wrench into it, i'm all for it.

As far as this BG result not being a valid handicapping factor for next Month's Derby, i believe there IS a way to use polytrack results to predict traditional dirt results. What that way is we might not know, but its there for the taking, if you can figure it out.

I love the 'mystery' of these polytrack results and the public not knowing what the heck to do from a handicapping standpoint. I love that. The more confusion, the better. Gives me a shot to break the bank if i come up with a unique theory on things that happens to work.

Kaos rules!