Durn Scratches

[George]

Ran my two "bread & butter" spot plays yesterday. Got 7 plays on one and "old reliable" reported no plays. First one hit 5/7 and was happy camper until imported results this morning. After scratches play two had produced 3 picks which all won at boxcar prices.

It is such a hassle re-exporting after scratches I have pretty much quit fighting it. Seems like there are a lot more scratches than used to occur. Does anyone have a good source of "early" as in around 10:00 am scratch sheets??

[fred4now]

My feelings exactly on scratches George, I finally just quit bothering with them. Right now I print out my possible plays in the morning without scratches and at the end of the day I never look to see what I missed so it doesn't tick me off. I downloaded a copy of synergism 6 a while ago and it automatically took out the sratches and added results as they became available as long as you were onlline. Being on DSL, I would love a feature like that.

But no, I can only find them 30 minutes prior to start of card.

[hurrikane]

I agree..this is a pain. The only places that don't seem to have a problem is NY CA and KY..everywhere else seems they just stick in names to look like they have full fields. Kind of like the idea of having them removed as they occur when you're online. If they get the info from everywhere else you're still stuck with half hour before show time.

[Carl]

Good topic.

As most of you have guessed by now, I am a lazy lout who most days has nothing better to do than play the horses on a daily basis.

I try and do a re-calc after scratches, I do find it pays off. IF I knew how to ROI them, I would be willing to bet that my spots that show up after scratches are at least 50% more effective than the ones that are picked pre-scratch.

The best of course are
1) The scratching of the other early speed and/or
2) Surface change

I think many people find re-figuring a race after scratches too much work. I posted to this at PA's once, everyone claimed they did and it was worth it. (I don't believe them about this either hehe.)

And I only get this re-calc done about 50% of the time, and I know it is worth it. And I usually have the time.

The problems for me are
1) the scratches on early card have to be done between 12:15 and 1:00 p.m. I do manage this one the most, and it gives me about half the tracks (usually use Philly, with aside of Equibase. But YOUBET is good too.)
2) Need a second shift around 2 p.m. for midwest tracks.
3) A a third for California, then a 4th (maybe a 5th) re-calc for night racing.

So any day I have any "real life" at all, I don't get this job done.

I like Ken's system for scratches, don't see how he could make it any simplier, unless it were able to read YOUBET or someone else on line. HDW has enough customers, maybe they could make it available if enough of us ask.

So....PLEASE HDW DO IT!

Later,
Carl

[fred4now]

I did keep track of how it affected my spot plays for awhile. For me doing the scratches on every card adds 5% to my ROI.

[Carl]

Sounds about right Fred.

Most every horse I miss that wins I am sure I remember by a factor of 10 (over the ones I miss that lose). That would account for my belief that it "would raise my ROI by 50%.

Of course the other thing is that late scratches only add maybe 2 or 3 plays for every 20 plays I had originally. So statistically the 5% increase may be more impactfull if you just ROI'ed the "late" plays.

Later,
Carl

[karlskorner]

BRIS and TSN have added a scratch watch to their daily free entries. Tells when a horse was scratched from a previous date and reason for scratch. Yesterday at CRC their were 12 previously scratched horses running, 5 of them won paying from $5.20, $10.20, $14.60, $14.60 and $19.00 , 3 of the previous scratched horses came in 3rd.

If a horse is scratched ask yourself why ? Sometimes it's a Vet's scratch or Stewards scratch but most of the time it's a Trainers scratch, looking for a softer spot. During the week a FTS was scratched 3 times, before his trainer found the "sweet spot", paid $29.00.

Keeping charts is a great help as it will identify the race he was scratched from against what he is going into today.

Karl

[George]

Karl....thanks very much for that tip. Have always wanted to track scratched horses and never had an easy mechanism to do it. Knowing who did the scratch is neat also. Thanks again.

[hurrikane]

Very nice Karl....anyone know how to download this as a text file?

[Donnie]

Hurri,
There are HTML parsing programs out there that will convert it to text...don't know how clean it would be..but one could start a database of these horse's quite simply and attach it to HTR data!
May play with it a bit!

[hurrikane]

thanks donnie...me too! let me know how it goes for you..

[tbrown]

I have been able to get the scratches in to test by copying an dpasting to Word, then saving the file as *.asc - MS-dos with formatting.
That .asc file can be imported in to Excel.

[hurrikane]

thanks Tbrown...seems you can also paste into Excel. Puts everything in seperate columns and then delete what you don't want...export to txt comma del and import straight into access( I tried opening the excel file directly into an access table but kept getting a 'text to long' error. I'm guessing something to to with the Brisnet header you can't delete.

Simple macro should do most of the grunt work. Seems to work fine. Anyone know any software to automatilcally download all these so I don't have to do it manually?

[karlskorner]

Hurrikane, etal;

Caution, before you start setting your DB's up for the scratches, you have one problem. For reasons I cannot explain they are publishing scratches on horses that have run a race after the scratch. Today at CRC there were 15 scratched horse, I had to eliminate 7 of these horses, as they had run a race after the published scratch. In my mind they don't count.

Of the 8 horses left, 3 won paying a little over $26.00 total and there was 1 3rd. On a $2.00 basis $16.00 in $26 + out is a fair return on a rotten, miserable rainy day at CRC.

Karl

[Bernie]

Karlskorner,

One of the nice things about a database is that it can quickly and easily tell you when a horse last ran. Do you have any data on how this nice sounding angle has done at CRC or elsewhere for a longer period of time?

[karlskorner]

Bernie;

I have been keeping charts for at least 15 years, up till a short time ago it meant cutting out the charts from DRF and posting to them scratches, trip notes etc. Recenlty DRF, Equibase and BRIS have been publishing charts, I like BRIS best of all from the 3 mentioned. The only charts I keep are for CRC and GP, as I attend daily.

Your question: Is it profitable to track scratches ? Very much so, there is hardly a day goes by that does not show a profit, as exampled by the 2 days at CRC mentioned earlier. Vet and Stewards scratches are obvious, but "trainer intent" is where the money lies. Aside from a physical problem, he is looking for the right spot for his horse. After viewing the "overnights" he may realize that there are horses running tomorrow that beat him in the past etc. and scratch his horse looking for a softer race in the conditon book. Most handicappers, including myself, gather their information from the PP's , but I am of the belief that the race you are looking at will never be run again in it's entirety, meaning that the 8 horses who ran on 8/7 at CRC will never compete as the same group in the future, so the statistics you gather from that race have little value.

Karl