CTC covered some of the related ground well in his post, and he is dead on about degrees of moisture. Those of you who have not already done so should check out the expo presentation on the home page, or do a search on this site using "Jerry Porcelli" (NYRA track supeintendent), "moisture content", or "changing track speeds".

Beyer is actually likely to make fewer assumptions about the track staying the same than Ragozin, although that does not necessarily mean he gets all of them right. I got a call after the Rebel from a well known guy who used to be on-camera for NYRA-- he uses Beyer, but he was questioning the Rebel figure. Andy had told him he split the race off simply because he didn't believe it, and the guy wanted to know what I had done with the race. I had given SJ the enormous figure, not that I liked it (I cringed), but because if you took that one horse out of the day it was completely clear what was going on-- the race fit tight with the day (I had the track getting faster, and actually added a little to that race), and internally within the race PP and Purge got exact pairups, with no one else running a new top. It was ice cold, so I had to give SJ the number, and Ragozin did the same (they run 3-4 points slower than us).

But I did the Blue Grass differently than Len did-- for whatever reason, I have learned that the 1 1/8ths at Kee often (meaning, as often as not) have no correlation with the 1 1/16th, let alone the 1 turn races. I gave them big figures, all right-- but not as big as I gave SJ. Ragozin basically gave both races the same figure, we had SJ almost 3 points better than TCE. At this point it is still an open question as to who got it right, based on results-- we will find out by looking at how ALL the horses out of the BG run.

Ragozin uses weight and ground, which makes for a significant advantage over Beyer both in using the figures for betting and for future figure making decisions. But Ragozin is way too dogmatic, in ways that don't stand up to any critical scrutiny-- in terms of an understanding of variant making, Beyer is way ahead of Ragozin and Friedman, who pretty much blindly accepts whatever Ragozin says without examining it.

Before this gets too confusing-- just went back and read your post again. I've been talking about the Rebel, which was SJ's biggest figure. We had his Ark Derby figure about a point faster then TGE's BG figure. Ragozin had it about 2 points SLOWER. Beyer had it about the same as Ragozin (1 TG/Rag point = 3.3 Beyer points). Again, time will tell.

I'm tired, so I may or may not have gotten it right or covered this all. Going home, more tomorrow.



TGJB