MatchUP Observation

[Turbulator]

I'm curious about something. First some definitions.

Contender:

A contender is any horse who has shown it can run competitively against today's projected first fraction.

Non-contender:

All others

I've been looking at a lot of old races, and I've noticed that most of the winning horses matchup to the first fraction. Now granted, sometimes every horse in the race who rates a line matches up this way, but other times half the field or less meets the criteria. And there are many instances where horses who look pretty good on paper don't match up this way at all. They just don't seem to get the job done.

The eventual winners might not be the horses I would pick, or they might otherwise have some strikes against them, but it seems like they match up to the first fraction a very high percentage of the time.


Here is just one (of many) examples:

Notice the 4 and the 8 horse don't matchup to the fist fraction. (The 1 horse won the race.)

But if you look at the bottom line betting line screen the 4 and 8 are ranked very highly while the 1 is ranked much lower. (The way I look at things this should be the other way around.)

Admittedly this was somewhat of a paceless race, but it doesn't seem to matter.

I'm curious if any of you matchers have noticed this or if any of you RDSS (Sartin) guys think this might be relevant to your contender selection or handicapping.

Steve