Contender Selection Benchmarks

[rdiam]

From Ken Massa of HTR:

"The holy grail for contender selection is to eliminate 50% of the horses, while retaining 90% of the winners. Take it from someone who has tested this to exhaustion, it is an unattainable goal. 80% is a more realistic target."

He goes on to point out the smaller the field, the more difficult contender selection becomes.

Many on this board focus on what percentage of the time their top "X" contenders win, but ignore how many horses they eliminate. PIcking 4 contenders in a 5 horse race will produce the winner 80% of the time just based on the math, with zero handicapping.

Bottom line, you need to toss at least half the field before you start calculating how often your contenders win.

Richard

[Mitch44]

Contenders are nothing more than a starting point. A player still must whittle down those five to a workable solution that will produce success for their final analysis.

They should also conduct a quick review of non-contenders for those horses that are overlooked by whatever means they get their contenders. Many of these non-contenders are downgraded from falsely gathered data or the data primarily used to obtain their contenders. Days since last race is a prime example as are repeaters etc.

Determining true contenders is the real goal and the ability to determine just how contentious a race rally is. Many of this years B.C. races had 14 starters and eliminating 7 of those horses is nothing but a starting point and no guarantee of success. The BC Classic only had 10 horses but at least 5 legit contenders, a very contentious race.

Thankfully most races only have 3 legit contenders regardless of the field size and the greater the field size the greater the degree of difficulty for our competitors to get it correct. However with just 3 many will still bet the wrong two horses.

Field size really takes a back seat to the number of real contenders in any size field. In other words even in a 6 horse field, all 6 can be legitimate contenders in one race and in another six horse field only one real contender. Contenders are just a starting point for success. Finding true contenders and winners is really the name of this game. Those without a good starting point are doomed to failure regardless of field size.

Mitch44

[shoeless]

Those without a good starting point are doomed to failure regardless of field size.

Good point Mitch

[Lefty]

Just using Doc Sartin's ctr selection guidelines works for me.

[ignacio todoberto bernal]

If RDSS picks the winner 90% + of the time on its TOP3 (WITH SOME TWISTING ! ) then ........we have one hell of a program !

nash