Matching lesson learned

[Bill Lyster]

In Saturday's feature race at Del Mar I made a very costly mistake. The first screen shot shows my contenders without the very good wire to wire poly horse Carlsbad. I am presenting this first to eliminate the confusion that I had by including him.

Look at the line that Starlarks had in tandem with Strawberry Tart. yes, in that race he finished behind Strawberry, but also see that he gained to the second call, lost lengths and then made up lengths - probably for traffic reasons.

If you were matching raw, the earliest horse given the pace of the race, up to the 2nd call was Starlarks

I really screwed the pooch and missed the 12/1 winner by not paying attention. Starlarks caught Strawberry at the wire, the exacta was pretty good and all I had was a win ticket on the place horse.


Here's to a calmer place from which to handicap. Next time,

Bill

[mikesal57]

Bill..dont worry, it happens to all of us

best thing is that there are always more to come with matchers

I cant match dirt routes for crap..but yesterdays 9th at Del Mar had me smiling and saying if I cant match this then hang it up..
Big field and plenty of early horses with one on the outside which will always produce a fast pace ...so I look for a horse that can close off a 47 half and lo and behold the 9 had it in his last race and a power move to boot..when the betting opened up the 9 was 2-1 ...then drifted to 9/2 ..won like a champ off the pace

I think one off the conditions of a tandem race is to look further into the horse that loses by less than 3-4 lengths

mike

[tfm]

This bugged me as well. Before the race, I checked out the 7/03 replays and noted that Starlarks was wider both turns than Strawberry Tart. She also moved SOONER. This is not necessarily a negative. ST got a nice inside trip and last moved the field. She was running away from Starlarks at the end. The problem, however, was that it appeared, from their previous races, that Starlarks would certainly be ahead of ST going into the stretch. Anyone who thought that ST would move 1st and be run down by Starlarks probably has a crystal ball. But this is exactly what happened. And, here's why it happened. After the race, Solis was interviewed and he mentioned that Starlarks was a horse that was not able to relax early. The connections had concerns about this. As luck would have it,however, she was squeezed between horses at the start, and, for some reason, according to Solis, she relaxed, for the 1st time, and, was thus able to make the last move.

There are things that make sense before the race and things that just can't be accounted for. If I miss one of the former, I try to learn from the experience. This was a case of fortuitous circumstances that resulted in an otherwise unexpected result. I can't really count on LUCK to win at this game, can I?

Here's the chart of the 7/3 race, to put it all into context:

Btw, these types of races where a single horse opens a long early lead and the fields comes like a cavalry charge, all together, are just about the most difficult ones to make sense of. More often than not, they're won by a last mover. Who would I like back from this chart? Nothing sticks out.

[tfm]

Here's the chart for the race. Note that the winner comes from LAST.