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Fairchild, I think your getting overwhelmed with everything right now, and that is understandable. I think right now you need to concentrate on pace line selection technique. To do that you need to become proficient in a few basics, and one of the most important ones is Form Cycle Analysis. You do that by using the +, 0, and the (+). The plus, the zero, and the plus within the zero. I'm sure your familiar with this technique or have at least heard it mentioned before.
What you need to do is go out and buy a Daily Racing Form, if you can call it that anymore. Looks more like a comic book these days, but thats another story. Anyway get a racing form and a red medium point pen. Open it to the first track and first race, and then start rating the first horse's pacelines, but do it from the bottom up. Doing it that way will get you to reading the pacelines historically and in the order they took place. This is important to see the form patterns ebb and flow.
Do every horse in that race. When you get done do the next race, and the next after that until you have rated each paceline in the entire card. Yes this is going to take time. Once you have completed the first card, then go back to the first race, go to the first horse, and start looking at the +, 0, and (+)'s. Start following them up from the bottom and you will see patterns.
Look at the + races....what do you see? Look at the race classes. Does the horse only get a plus when it races $7500 claiming races and below? Does the horse only get a plus when it races 8.0f races and above? Before it races a plus race, what happened in the race before? was it a (+) race? Does the horse only get plus's in turf races? Does the horse get plus races when it runs on a wet track, or does it get zeros? These are the kinds of things your going to start to pick up.
Do this for the entire racing form, for every horse. It might take you a week or more to do that, but once your done, your going to have a new understanding of form cycles and what effects them. You will probably never have to mark the form again because you will be able to do this mentally from that point forward. Your going to see patterns of the +, 0, and the (+). This will help you forecast or predict what point in the horse's form cycle it's in. It will also tell you what class level it's competitive in, and what distance/surface it prefers.
This skill is very important to paceline selection. This is going to help guide you to the most appropriate line to select. Thats another thing to understand, there is no right or wrong paceline to select, only the most appropriate for todays conditions. That's a Howard Sartin quote. I think he said it in the paceline manual.
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