A couple of weeks ago a new subscriber asked me to explain the ‘Pace and Going’ data provided in the members area of the blog. Even though I still use these figures on a daily basis, feedback from the blog suggested the ‘Pace and Going’ pages were rarely viewed and due to the awkward process of publishing the figures I had stop updating them.
The one thing that became apparent from his comments were that although I thought I had offered sufficient detail on the ‘how and why’ there was still some confusion on what he was looking at.
Without going in to the intricacies of speed handicapping you can appreciate that over the years I have built up a database which provides.............
a good view of what a horse should achieve over any All Weather course and distance within their grade. Once a going allowance is arrived at for a meeting I am able to assess those races that were run above the standard.
In the example above you can see that Bain’s Cross yesterdays 11-2 winner has always run above standard albeit off slow pace races which is denote by the columns. Each column reading left to right goes from faster to slower in 1% increments. The columns may refer to one run or multiple runs off of that pace. Just to manage your expectations, there were to other horses of merit yesterday: Vastly 2nd 2:20 Kempton, Jordanstown 2nd 4:00 Wolverhampton.
This will never be an exact science and like all methodical processes they have good runs and bad runs but we all suffer those regardless of our weapon of choice. Even when a race appears to have faster horses where there are candidates that have run above standard of the pace and going our ears should prick up and take notice until we have evidence that they are not able to do the same off a faster pace.
In the hope I may have caught your imagination and you can see the benefits of viewing races in this manner today’s horses of merit are:
SIBAYA 2:10 WOLVERHAMPTON
NAPINDA \ LUV U WHATEVER 2:20 SOUTHWELL
HANNAHS TURN 3:20 SOUTHWELL
MIAKO 4:20 SOUTHWELL
BLADES LAD 5:20 SOUTHWELL
As I keep Southwell ratings separate from the other courses due the different surface there is always a high percentage of horses trying the surface for the first time so should be viewed with a degree of caution.
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