JB:

I wasn't implying you made them "fit", just that if you subscribe to the theory that horses more often than not run within a tight range of their bests, you will generally feel more comfortable with a variant (or set of variants) for a card that has many horses running in line with what they've run previously.

Sometimes that means having separate sprint and route variants, or sliding the variant during the day if it appears something physical has happened to the track even on a clear/fast windless day. For what its worth, when I made my own figures, I never wrestled with the dilemma of splitting variants. I've always felt that on some days there was so much about a track surface you could observe but not easily quantify with preset equations (effect of humidity, moisture evaporation, watering during the day, harrowing between races, etc.) that the only way to get it "right" meant splitting variants.


Conversely, since Ragozin believes horses don't run their tops that often, he will find little reason to "slide" variants for a day or distance. On a clear/fast day, if that means that all horses running 9F bounce 5 points off their last, so be it. If you believe as he does that this happens often, you're less likely to question whether something has happened to the racing surface during the day.


The point I wanted to make was that in and of itself, knowing that horses run within a tighter range on one product vs the other tells you nothing at all about their respective accuracy.