Sixth Race Santa Anita March 4, 2018 - Play Hard To Get

Just a quick look at a point. Turf races are often paceless. This particular optional claimer seemed very much so. In this case - and it may be anomolous for all I know - the pacelessness was pointed. The uber categories for analysis are Class, Form, Speed, and Pace. And pace may be the most amorphous and nuanced.

Looking here at the past performances of the winner and second place finisher.  In the paceless race they stood out as fairly even performers. That is: their early TimeformUS Pace ratings were not terribly slow versus the others, and neither were their Late figures.

The race was marked by an objection concerning the break by second place Jockey Nakatani, who handled his horse well enough to only miss by a head. Play Hard To Get was well handled by Jockey Raj Maragh on the lead - and he moved ahead nicely on the final turn. It has rained a lot, and the track was listed as soft, but DRF felt that it was fast as race time came around.

The winner was not hard to overlook, having failed to win in two years - but he had high speed second only to Tequila Joe, who he bested here by 4+ lengths, and his lack of success still made him a fit with this bunch. T.J. has not been dependable in the stakes ranks, and continued so in the OC ranks, where such undependably is most common. He was claimed out of this race by Mark Glatt. Good luck to him. The fact that the owner is ready to sell the horse - what kind of weight do you apply there in a heuristic?

There were horses stepping down in class, horses with speed, jockeys with hot hands - enough data to obscure a factor that may have been deciding: steady pace performance. Interest in finding speed that will get loose, or a late runner that will capitalize on hot fractions, should not be the be-all end-all strategem. Perhaps, if you predict a lack of pace, you should consider the horses with  "steady" Time Form numbers. You would like to see the future where Prince of Arabia next time out won at 35-1 too!

I'd finish by citing some comments by a panelist on an edition of the BBC's In These Times that we were listening to earlier today. The subject was Sun Tzu. Panelist said The Art of War message was: Each occasion needs to be analyzed individually, by a general with an open mind, attentive to all sorts of factors - terrain, climate, on and on. That is, using situational thinking, and even understanding the situations are constantly evolving themselves, and differently for each participant in the battle. - Racetrack Romero.


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Your brain loves long shots. The less likely or predictable a reward is, the more active your dopamine neurons become and the longer they fire — flooding your brain with a soft euphoria. -Something I picked up on from various sources.