Pace and Cap - Sartin Methodology & The Match Up - View Single Post

socantra · 12-16-2005, 12:08 PM

Sorry! I was feeling a bit rushed and taciturn yesterday. I'll try to elaborate a bit on Fast Fred Pro.

I bought a copy several years ago. I believe it was version 2 point something. Paul Clements has been very prompt in responding to questions and puts out a new update every so often. Minor updates are available free on the website and when he does a major update he charges registered users something like ten or twenty bucks for a new CD. As near as I can remember, he notifies me when a new major update comes out.

I've always thought Fast Fred has a lot of potential. Its another number cruncher. It takes some Brohammer/Sartin, some William Scott (How Will Your Horse Run Today), some Danny Holmes (Ten Steps to Winning) and a few other folks thrown in.

It does an equalization and track to track adjustment from some unspecified "National Pars", which seems to work fairly well. I haven't been able to track down exactly whose pars they are and they are not easily user accessible. As I said, they seem to work fairly well and he does update fairly often, so I don't know if he is updating his pars or not.

The program produces a power number and an odds line based on that number. There's a lot of user control on the weighting of the various factors that go into making up the power number and at one time I got the odds line working pretty well. Then he did a major update and I was back to square one. Take the advice of a lazy dummy. If you tweak the odds line, write down your weightings somewhere.

The automatic paceline selection options are based on an average pace figure from Danny Holmes rather than Sartin/Brohammer, and other calculations are taken from that paceline. I've argued with Paul several times that the Holmes figure gives too much emphasis to Pace of the Race and in the new version he gives you a manual paceline selection option. The program selects and, if you want, you have the option of confirming or changing its selection. I feel that is a major improvemrnt.

The new version has some import/export capabilities for spreadsheet calculations and will use TSN exotic results files for some sort of modeling setup. There are also some Excel templates. I really haven't taken the time to look at these yet. The program will use data files from Trackmaster, BRIS, TSN, Formulator and ITS/Postime Daily.

Its not the program I use all the time. I'm personally much more comfortable with the Sartin programs. Out of the box its no more than average. If you want to put in a lot of work learning and tweaking, I think it could be turned into a very, very good program, pzrticularly with the new import/export features. There's a lot of user control and If someone doesn't come out with a good windows Sartin style program before long, it could become my program of choice, or at least my front end for further Excel development.

Hope this helps. Let me know if you've got any more questions.

Dick...

12-16-2005, 12:08 PM	#3
socantra Grade 1 Join Date: Jun 2005 Location: Norman, OK Posts: 387	Fast Fred Pro revisited Sorry! I was feeling a bit rushed and taciturn yesterday. I'll try to elaborate a bit on Fast Fred Pro. I bought a copy several years ago. I believe it was version 2 point something. Paul Clements has been very prompt in responding to questions and puts out a new update every so often. Minor updates are available free on the website and when he does a major update he charges registered users something like ten or twenty bucks for a new CD. As near as I can remember, he notifies me when a new major update comes out. I've always thought Fast Fred has a lot of potential. Its another number cruncher. It takes some Brohammer/Sartin, some William Scott (How Will Your Horse Run Today), some Danny Holmes (Ten Steps to Winning) and a few other folks thrown in. It does an equalization and track to track adjustment from some unspecified "National Pars", which seems to work fairly well. I haven't been able to track down exactly whose pars they are and they are not easily user accessible. As I said, they seem to work fairly well and he does update fairly often, so I don't know if he is updating his pars or not. The program produces a power number and an odds line based on that number. There's a lot of user control on the weighting of the various factors that go into making up the power number and at one time I got the odds line working pretty well. Then he did a major update and I was back to square one. Take the advice of a lazy dummy. If you tweak the odds line, write down your weightings somewhere. The automatic paceline selection options are based on an average pace figure from Danny Holmes rather than Sartin/Brohammer, and other calculations are taken from that paceline. I've argued with Paul several times that the Holmes figure gives too much emphasis to Pace of the Race and in the new version he gives you a manual paceline selection option. The program selects and, if you want, you have the option of confirming or changing its selection. I feel that is a major improvemrnt. The new version has some import/export capabilities for spreadsheet calculations and will use TSN exotic results files for some sort of modeling setup. There are also some Excel templates. I really haven't taken the time to look at these yet. The program will use data files from Trackmaster, BRIS, TSN, Formulator and ITS/Postime Daily. Its not the program I use all the time. I'm personally much more comfortable with the Sartin programs. Out of the box its no more than average. If you want to put in a lot of work learning and tweaking, I think it could be turned into a very, very good program, pzrticularly with the new import/export features. There's a lot of user control and If someone doesn't come out with a good windows Sartin style program before long, it could become my program of choice, or at least my front end for further Excel development. Hope this helps. Let me know if you've got any more questions. Dick...