Over the Air wrote:
keniza999 wrote: if you take the fourth finisher King Of The Delta (mr77) beaten 9L as a line horse PIETRO MASCAGNI should be a mr104 or net 90 which sounds fair to me. a gross 79 is grossly unfortunate....
Keniza this in a nutshell is why I disagree so with the MR system.
Kenzia and Over The Air, after your criticism I would be very interested in your solution to give every horse a better chance to win in each handicap.
1. No one on any panel would argue that KING OF THE DELTA's rating of 77 which he earned when 2nd to YAMOTO on Sept 5th was repeated when running last on the 19th or when 9 lengths behind PIETRO MASCAGNI on Oct 31st.
2. Not only does Merit Ratings work in theory, what is really amazing is how honest horses are, and how often they run to within 1 or 2 pounds time and again. Of course there are other factors in every race, and that is the proof.
3. Choosing the line horse can be difficult, but most often it's very clear. So if you rating a meeting where 100+ runs occurred and you are fitting those runs like pushing two hair brushes together, and you then frank that with the career of each horse to that point you get a high degree of confidence. Once you do it for a while it's just how you handle the exceptions that cause some head-aches.
4. When I first saw the appeal I thought it unlikely that PIETRO could have run too high a rating winning by 0.05 on debut. However, I was surprised to see that independently I had indeed arrived at 88 as well.
5. I have no idea how the appellants arrived at 88, but I got there by having SEVEN SOVEREIGNS (5yo who ran 2nd on Sept 21st) a bit higher than official, so I used him to measure THE TIN MAN (winner) and STAR OF JOBURG (3rd) on Oct 17th. From there PIETRO MASCAGNI win is easier to understand because even though 2nd and 3rd (SQUARE THE CIRCLE and STAR OF JOBURG) don't have published ratings, they still do have run and have ratings (or collateral form if you like) for their runs.
6. The beauty of horse racing is that (unlike a casino) if you are prepared to do some work you can, and will, find horses whose probability exceeds the odds offered. In this case I would be assuming that PIETRO MASCAGNI was possibly an 88 rather than the handicapper's rating of 77. If he appeared in a race where his odds was offered as if he is a 77, one would have to have a go because it's a passing window of opportunity to see who is right. One run normally fixes things (unless somethings happens and we get another chance).
7. The outcome of the appeal is not inconsistent. Mike De Kock plays a slightly different game to most in that he wants to get to the high stakes table as fast as possible. He also realizes that a high rating has value if you play it right and he has options available. Someone else might want to keep ratings as low as possible to play the handicap game. The handicapper has argued that they are making ratings as low as possible (as generally applied to everyone) and so they are keeping the rating pessimistically low rather than optimistically high. Many of the lines here are from horses with a single run so we get to punt on who is right. Thank god.
Topic Author
