curious

Not a lot of excitement to watch sitting on the hill overlooking the races I would have thought. Might be better to just go have a NY's day picnic on the hill and not worry about holding the races?

Pretty much worked in the 90s too. We were at least paying our own way more or less. I thought the writing was on the wall in 2001 when the Racing Act was still a bill. So it has pretty much proved. I must say, as an old codger about to retire from the day job in a few months, I have spent quite a bit of time in the last 2 or 3 years replacing myself on various boards and committees including in racing. I've worked hard to do that, recruiting younger more energetic people and once done, stepped aside. In all cases they are still there. I still occasionally support those boards and committees but don't influence their decision making. It's a bit of work recruiting the right people for organisations that I treasure and want the best for but it's been worth the effort.

Is there a law against that? On a good track and a 4 horse race why would you?

I'm really enjoying the lead ins to the US races. Big bonus. They may be getting on track.

I've usually used MS Access and Mardi has helped me at times writing the queries. If you can find a DB package that suits, it will allow you, as Mardi says, to run the group by and where clauses etc. and you can test a lot of ideas that way using historic data. I have a couple of other mates that know how to do this stuff that I can turn to. I'm not an IT genius by any stretch but if the data is in there, I can easily get help to extract what I want.

Do we need to? Should that be the objective in this day and age? Or, aside from an odd carnival, is that objective misplaced except for the likes of the Melbourne Cup?

Thanks barryb. I'll risk saying it again. Hopefully, there's a couple of winners in that lot. Good luck!

Most of that report appears to have been based on " advice on" various travesties that "came from very close at hand" rather than any of his own investigation. I agree. Very disappointing.

Thanks guys. You may be falling into the same trap as Thomass by applying a population statistic to individuals. As an academic and educator, I'm not sure I fit your generalisation.

Yep, that too.

Yep. Do you have enough land there to build a 2000m track?

I just have to go Miss Curious in the first today.

It's also close to the beach and Pitty likes it there.

Might have been from a delusion in the NZTR business plan about optimal field size? This is from the old 2010-12 one: 2.5 Field Sizes Due to punter preference, NZTR must ensure strategies to encourage consistent field sizes of 12-14 starters.

So what you really want to play with is a distribution where the centre shifts left or right depending on confidence but the range doesn't shift. So that would vary from event to event? I think I'm getting the idea but at the same time scratching my head as to how you would do that. I think you'd need to set some rules which you also can play with around how much you shift the centre relative to some sort of shift in confidence score which presumably you already produce. I think that could be done.

Yeahh, if you chuck the outliers there's probably no significant difference between 7 and 14 going by that.

ok, so not centred on the mean. A kinda slightly skewed distribution but centred on what?

ok so you are maybe saying a non-normal distribution but still centred on the mean with the tail on one side longer than that on the other?

OK. I had to read this post a few times to grasp it but I think I'm getting the issue now. What you are thinking you might want to use is not a normal distribution centred on the mean but a distribution centred on the midpoint of the range (excluding outliers)?

Not so last I looked. Think 7 was the highest per runner. Not saying that is cost effective but 2 x 7 horse fields produce considerably higher turnover than a 14 horse field.

It's not just fitness either and I've done it myself here. But where you have a niggly difficult to ascertain soundness problem it's tempting to use races as a test of the current hypothesis and solution.

I quite like 6 - 7 horse fields as betting propositions and generally they have the highest turnover per runner.

This is another problem with trying to assess chance in NZ events. You can assess suitability but it is hard to assess fitness. In the UK and US you can assume it.

Yes. There are countless examples but a memorable one for me, and this is going back to the seventies, is Alleged. As a four year old he won the Royal Whip in the spring and didn't race again till autumn due to health issues. His first start back he broke the Longchamp 10f course record in the Prix du Prince d'Orange before going on to win his second Arc in his only other start. I really wish they would look at this here if they seriously want to increase attractiveness of the product to punters and increase wagering revenue.

Yeahh and that was exacerbated a few years back now when there was a push to start horses in races in preference to trials for that purpose to increase starter numbers. It was particularly so when we had free racing so it became more cost effective to "trial" horses on racedays rather than at trials and there was a concurrent significant increase in trial fees. I said at the time it was folly because it would reduce punter confidence if they could not know whether horses were there to try and win or were just racing for conditioning purposes. I think that move is yet another thing that has come back to bite them on the bum in terms of revenue. I.e., pursuit of a target of starter numbers to increase revenue, failing to understand the situation from a wagering perspective. It was based on falsely interpreted data anyway in regard to the relationship between starter numbers and turnover. They saw higher turnover in races with higher number of starters but ignored the fact that turnover per runner was higher in races with less starters (at least 7+). Plain stupid.