Results differ

[mr. posh]

Saturday's 11th race at LAD ia listed in unoffical order in the results. It lists the correct numbers for the payout but it lists the unofficial order next to the numbers. I feel this is wroing. How can the correct payoffs be listed for future research? I also show the wrong 4th place finisher. I am a superfecta player so it is important to know the correct numbers.

[km]

Complicated situation for me there Posh. Thanks for the heads up.

The #8 won the race and was dq' d to 5th

The new 4th place finisher was #1, but that is irrelevant because the superfecta was an "all" in the 4th spot. Notating the 4th horse would have no meaning in this case and knowing the identity of the official 4th place finisher is useless for research since all the other finishers would have cashed the ticket as well.

Our small Result files do not contain the 4th place finisher (as on the PGM screen there is no listing for 4th place finisher or superfecta). So the KM screen pulls the order direct from the chart in the unofficial order which is correct for the superf 99.8% of the time.

How to list the 4th place finisher in such a situation on the KM screen --- either if there is a DQ or an "all" payoff ? Complicated.

There is no alignment of data on the chart that would help me parse that information unless they add an "official" vs. "unofficial" final position column. I guess I could revert to the official order of finish numbers and leave the "4" blank if there is a difference. But cause a problem with dead-heats which are now correctly shown with a "1" and "1" for both horses on the KM. Damned if i do, damned if i don't.

Ron is developing a new file for us that may handle it, but I'm stuck for now. Mike Dee also studies superfectas, maybe he can advise. Perhaps it can be change manually in Access, or the race deleted for research because the 4th place finisher does not help the cause anyway.

[njcurveball]

Ken,

While we are on the results topic, I noticed something strange on some of the screens for the 8th race at Aqueduct on Thursday 1/19/2006.

It shows a W next to both #1 Tomorrows Dance and #8 Tomorrows Lady on the TLC screen. On the KM screen where the prices are posted #8 Tomorrows Lady is listed as both the win and place horse. The HTR and VEL screens shows both horses as winning.

Can you give it a look and see if you have the same thing?

thanks,
Jim

[km]

That's an odd one, isn't NJ ? No dead heat or dq in this case.

There were two horses in the same race with the first 10 characters of their name "Tomorrows " --- and amazingly they finished 1-2. The "Tomorrow" cold exacta.

Tomorrows Lady (won)
Tomorrows Dance (2nd)

HTR2 uses the first 10 characters to fetch the names for the results. If two horses have the same character set and they both finish in the money, it can go goofy.

This happens about once every 100,000 races with horse names.
Usually it is due to duplicate names from foreign shipper that ends up in the same race with a North American of the same name. i.e.

Summer Time Girl (ARG)
Summer Time Girl

How does this effect the research functions for Robot or Export? The win horse is correctly identified and eveything right. The Place and Show payoff for the 2nd place finisher may get confused, but I don't think it will effect the statistics match for the factors for the 2nd place horse if you use the Charts. I'll look into it, but there are reasons for the 10 char limitation that have to do with other processes in HTR2.

There have been other cases of errors due to duplicate text that made their way through to our data from Equibase. Sire names, jockeys, trainers, etc

Example: Juan Gonzales must be the name of 10 different jocks and so they have to try and separate with other parts of the name. But sometimes everything matches anyway=

Juan Miguel Gonzales
Juan Miquel Gonzales III
Juan Miguel Gonzales Jr.

If the same text name is used for the wrong jockey in the db, the stats could get scrambled and we might not find out for weeks.

When dealing with massive acculumations of data , shit is gonna happen. Luckily, with our users keeping tabs, and the error filters built into HDW's data stream, and the huge number of error catches in HTR2 software, we get 99.99% of it right.









.

[AwolAtHTR]

hi Jim,

yes, I have seen this issue but the HX4 export file has the correct numbers for xFIN and nAFIN have been correct for the races which I found were not reported correctly by HTR2. That is, the PRG screen will also be wrong in a sample race when this bug is found.

by the samples which I have seen this happen, the problem is that the first eight (or maybe ten) characters of the horses name match. IE, your sample has 'Tomorrows ' with first ten matching. Also, your example, the 'bug' is clear because the name appears twice on the same screen. Other samples, the finish is NOT the same on all the screens. But, just note that the leading characters are matching whenever the screens do not match.

I ignored (ie, not tell Ken) the issue because I felt Ken had more interesting things to do then fix this seldom encountered bug and impact is also minor.

duane

[njcurveball]

Duane and Ken

Thanks for your replies. I do most of my work in the database, but like to peruse the previous days results to get a feel of what is winning.

1 in 10,000 isn't anything to worry about. Although if it is just 10 characters, there are lots of Karakorum horses in New York that may make this more likely in the future. Good thing it isn't Harness with all the Hanover horses. ;-)

Jim

[MikeDee]

As Ken mentioned I use access and I fool around with supers. I use the afin for all my studies since this field has the 4th place finisher. There is no way to deal with a all payout.

The only thing would be to simply delete this race from your study data.