JR,

1 is an excellent question, problem is a complete answer would take a huge amount of time-- there are so many different situations that come up, and so many factors that come into play. Sometimes the day as a whole hangs together pretty tight (which was the case with the routes on Wood day), so you are finding the specific variant within a small range of variants (about a point either way) that makes the most sense given the figure histories of the horses-- this is true for all of us who make "projection method" figures.

But in general, this is also true whether you have supporting surrounding race info or not (the track was getting faster on Preakness day, but the variant for that race was pretty clear, as you will be able to see for yourself). Bottom line, you are looking at a fixed set of relationships WITHIN the race, fixed by beaten lengths, weight, and ground. You don't pick out horses in advance to tie the variant to. You look at all the possible ways of doing the race, and the effect on the figure of each horse, and see which scenario is most likely, with the info from the surrounding races, days, history of how the track plays etc. as additional information bits. Most of the time you are quickly down to only one reasonable scenario, occasionally two, seldom more.

This is a very quick, incomplete answer. It's one of those things that is much easier to understand in practice than in theory, so we're going to attach the Wood sheets. The correct scenario had one horse running a new top, two others pairing, and the rest running off races. Take a look at what happens if you use any other variant for the race-- add or subtract, the other scenarios are far less likely. Let me know what you think.

As for 2, I went into this in my original post prior to the Derby. Ragozin sheets only show you the ground for the last turn, and even then only say 4 or MORE wide-- 2 horses can have the same notation and be in different paths.

I picked it up because the RELATIONSHIP between SS and the other Wood horses in the race was wrong on Ragozin's Derby pre-entries. I immediately had Litfin go back to check it. My guess is that they had him inside on the first turn, but that's just a guess.



TGJB