I wonder about the effects when a "Weak Trainer" in one race, is "Best Trainer" in another race and they are the same person.
I assume that the designation is based upon a comparison of other Trainers in the race, not on actual abilities of a specific Trainer.
It seems that a Trainer rating based upon a Trainers abilities would provide more consistent information.
Currently a "Weak Trainer" could be a very solid Trainer in actuality.

Agreed re: trainers. But this raises some significant questions:

A) How do you rate trainers/connections other than by their records? I have an answer to that, but I welcome any other input.

B) Some of the Profiler Abilities are proving to be Not very useful. Of course, you can hide them. But, they are taking up various places of the "bitfield" that I use to track abilities. In the future, I'd like to get rid of them as more time, user consensus, and my own investigation warrants. I'm not sure how to handle this situation just yet -- one man's junk is another man's.... I have a few potential solutions to this as well.

-N

This thread is begging for the hard question. Can ES keep its own trainer stats? Which leads to the question - Should ES keep its own trainer stats? BRIS downloaders get that information right now - don't they?

The Profiler Abilities are my favorite part of your program and any improvement on it is greatly appreciated.
I prefer to see Positive and/or Negative attributes of a horse. I like to combine this information with a Racing Form View and draw my own conclusions of each race.
Black Box handicapping is mysterious and uninteresting. I think many people try them, but after a few losing sessions will move on to try something else.

Basic Question
Does ES need its own Trainer stats in order to create Profile Abilities?
What does ES read to distinguish a Weak Trainer from a Strong Trainer?

Amen brother.

Mike,

Trainer "abilities" as pegged in the Profiler are entirely based on either the current meet or year record of the trainer. The decision which to use (year or meet) is based on how many races the trainer has participated in overall. There are better ways to determine the relative strength of a ta horse's connections... but none dealing with only one card's worth of data.

Mike,

I am not sure about your question re: ES needs its own trainer stats to create profile abilities. No, I guess it does not. Afterall, it currently only deals minimally with the impact of the trainer.
BRIS fans -- the simulations will use trainer stats for first time starters, and you have the opportunity of engaging the BRIS trainer stats in the sims when tuning is applied.

Will, Mike, et al,

Finally -- whether or not ES can, and should, create Trainer Stats is actually, as Will put it, a very hard question for more than a few reasons. And, while BRIS trainer stats are very useful, A) everyone has them B) they give you little information about the time frame they are taken from C) they are very broad in their application. I will say this -- ES V4 will make use of Connection stats, or connection criteria. The method used to determine this 'criteria' I have not seen implemented anywhere else. Beyond that, I'll let your imaginations fly with what I may or may not have come up with. Feel free to share if you imagine anything nice.

-N

Hi Everyone,

I think it would be worthwhile for all of you to take a look at a sample of good trainer stat analysis. Go to www.edbain.com and look at a copy of a sample report of his service. Can something like this be part of Equisim? Or maybe an additional software off shoot that can generate this information from our same Bris or Tsn datafiles?

With regard to jockeys, might I suggest stats on how the jockey does on speed horses(E running style) at long prices or his or her success riding on the turf, etc, etc. Could we rate a jockey by how well he rides favorites? Does he or she win at a higher rate on favorites than expected, how does he or she do on longshots?

Again, this is one area most people don't have good information. Remember just how successful the first speed and pace handicappers were!!

Bill

Bill,

I subscribed to Ed Bain's reports - for a month.

I don't see how he gets 4 plays a day out of this information but he says he bets $200 each on 4 races per day.

I couldn't find more than a couple to bet on and they were chalkier than a grade school blackboard.

If I had created these reports and knew everything that went into them I might have gotten more out of them, but as it was I was sorely disappointed with his reports and he does a better job than most of posting instructions for their use.

While trainer/jockey stats have to have some impact on the outcome of the race I do not believe it is the be-all end-all of handicapping. I am reminded that neither the jockey nor the trainer runs the race. Think about it - you've got a dumb animal going around an oval trying to cross an imaginary line first while riding an even dumber animal.

Something to think about some more,

Bob

Back to the subject.

Trainers are an extremley important part of a race equation. The impact of the care, training and medication a horse has been receiving is probably more important than it's E2 speed in the last race.
I don't know if its economically feasible to have great depth in ES's research, but more meaningful trainer statistics could be beneficial.