[Jimmy R]

Thanks Mike and Brian. That helps a lot.

The biggest thing I’m taking from both replies is that I need to stop looking at the rankings as the final answer and first ask whether today’s Race Demand and the selected paceline give the horse a realistic chance to reproduce those rankings.

Mike, your point about demanding a friendly F1/F2 scenario even more strongly when the Early horse is short-priced really hit home after the Parx race I was referring to.

Brian, I also like the idea of looking at Race Demand first, then using the rankings and convergence to identify which contender is most likely to reproduce its line today. That gives me a better framework than just looking for the horse with the most #1s.

I’m going to start paying more attention to those two checks before I call anything a key or a Win/Place play.