Desert Orchid
Senior Jockey
- Joined
- Aug 2, 2005
- Messages
- 25,765
They say there is more than one way to skin a cat.
Quite why anyone would want to skin a cat in the first place is beyond even a non-cat-person like me. It reminds me of the last time I visited the local RSPCA place. It was tiny. You couldn't swing a cat in there...
That's me sidetracked before I begin!
Looking through the Ayr card today reminded me of an aspect of my methodology that I don't think I've mentioned in detail before. And it's maybe something others do in principle/effect.
It relates to the idea of better races being better form. That might sound obvious but what I mean is that a one length winner of a Class 2 handicap might be better-handicapped than a three-length winner of a Class 4 one.
I suppose it all boils down to your own way of evaluating the form, though.
Years ago, around the time I was having letters to the Raceform Update serialised, I laid out my basic methods. (They stopped printing them round about the same time Raceform released their book on handicapping - I contacted Tony Peach and was led to believe (without giving his exact words) it was because my methods were so similar to the ones their handicappers used [at that time].)
But I had a Pauline moment one day at Ayr.
I'd always assumed that in order to win a handicap a horse had to be better than its mark. But that day, for the first time that I could remember, I came across an all-age Class 6 Maiden Handicap. The majority of the runners had form figures 000000. So here was a race framed to allow horses that couldn't beat me to pick up a first prize.
That was when I realised that I had to make some kind of allowance for the more valuable handicaps to count for more than the everyday ones.
The principle still holds good - if not even more so with more lucrative sponsorship - today.
I reckon in some of the biggest handicaps horses that finish as far back as tenth might still have outrun their handicap mark. That's highly unlikely to be the case in a £10k Class 4 race.
The other aspect of this is that the handicappers are tied to their procedures and if the likes of the Wokingham finished with a host or runners within a couple of lengths of each other, the handicappers will assume they have done their job well and put up a narrow winner relatively little when it is highly likely that it has beaten a host of other well-handicapped horses. I would be quite categorical that a winner of a race worth at least £100k has more than 4lbs or 5lbs in hand of its mark.
We've seen examples recently of horses getting down much lower than their ability levels and exploiting this system, for example Kitty's Light over jumps, landing the Eider, Scottish National and Whitbread. Having gone up to 149 in 2021, a coldly executed campaign resulted in the horse getting into the Eider off 132 before following up at Ayr and Sandown off 140, in the latter race taking advantage of the no penalty condition.
For me, this is brilliant training if I catch on to them (I didn't back it at Newcastle, though) and total wido-ness when I miss them!
Summerghand and Orbaan are other examples for a trainer especially gifted in this [dark] art.
But it's all part of the fun.
Quite why anyone would want to skin a cat in the first place is beyond even a non-cat-person like me. It reminds me of the last time I visited the local RSPCA place. It was tiny. You couldn't swing a cat in there...
That's me sidetracked before I begin!
Looking through the Ayr card today reminded me of an aspect of my methodology that I don't think I've mentioned in detail before. And it's maybe something others do in principle/effect.
It relates to the idea of better races being better form. That might sound obvious but what I mean is that a one length winner of a Class 2 handicap might be better-handicapped than a three-length winner of a Class 4 one.
I suppose it all boils down to your own way of evaluating the form, though.
Years ago, around the time I was having letters to the Raceform Update serialised, I laid out my basic methods. (They stopped printing them round about the same time Raceform released their book on handicapping - I contacted Tony Peach and was led to believe (without giving his exact words) it was because my methods were so similar to the ones their handicappers used [at that time].)
But I had a Pauline moment one day at Ayr.
I'd always assumed that in order to win a handicap a horse had to be better than its mark. But that day, for the first time that I could remember, I came across an all-age Class 6 Maiden Handicap. The majority of the runners had form figures 000000. So here was a race framed to allow horses that couldn't beat me to pick up a first prize.
That was when I realised that I had to make some kind of allowance for the more valuable handicaps to count for more than the everyday ones.
The principle still holds good - if not even more so with more lucrative sponsorship - today.
I reckon in some of the biggest handicaps horses that finish as far back as tenth might still have outrun their handicap mark. That's highly unlikely to be the case in a £10k Class 4 race.
The other aspect of this is that the handicappers are tied to their procedures and if the likes of the Wokingham finished with a host or runners within a couple of lengths of each other, the handicappers will assume they have done their job well and put up a narrow winner relatively little when it is highly likely that it has beaten a host of other well-handicapped horses. I would be quite categorical that a winner of a race worth at least £100k has more than 4lbs or 5lbs in hand of its mark.
We've seen examples recently of horses getting down much lower than their ability levels and exploiting this system, for example Kitty's Light over jumps, landing the Eider, Scottish National and Whitbread. Having gone up to 149 in 2021, a coldly executed campaign resulted in the horse getting into the Eider off 132 before following up at Ayr and Sandown off 140, in the latter race taking advantage of the no penalty condition.
For me, this is brilliant training if I catch on to them (I didn't back it at Newcastle, though) and total wido-ness when I miss them!
Summerghand and Orbaan are other examples for a trainer especially gifted in this [dark] art.
But it's all part of the fun.
