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