[Bill Lyster]

This happened two times this last weekend. Once at Churchill and again at Hollywood. The favorites were shown by RDSS to have large advantages over their fields and the odds on the actual favorite were not too low. First the info from CD. In both cases there were several tandem competitors with the big number horse.

Lost Aptitude had just beaten several of the same horses pretty handily. One of the members suggested some distrust of the horse's last line. When I looked at the line I saw what I would describe as gradual improvement. The first screen shot shows a 103 SR in the first route attempt on soft turf, followed by a 99 SR on yielding turf and then a 107 on firm turf. I did not view the 99 as a regression because the DTV of 34 wasn't anywhere near in line with the other two variants, plus the horse competed well on that off track.

I bet Lost Aptitude to win and did not have the exotics, but this is where it gets interesting. If you look at the tandem races see that the 3 and 7 were close to each other in tandem 1 and that the 4, 10 and Lost Aptitude were close to each in the yielding turf of tandem 2. There were no common horses in the two tandems but LA improved from race to race.

If you look at the bottom panel you see a 6 point advantage in adjusted SR and more than 1 point advantage in TE. The BL/BL screen shot shows an 8.2 point advantage after I put in the 9 off his losing Breeders Cup and very sustained loss. Off the Segments screen you could probably make a case to eliminate the 9 from place consideration in the interest of controlling bet size, as the horse showed 19.2/14.6/10.9 lengths back (5th best).

So the plan for exotics was to key the 1 on top with the tandem runners that were close to each other. See the Result chart for how they ran and the prices.