By Gene Kershner, Equispace
So we've had 22 days of racing on the new Pro-Ride
surface at the Oak Tree Meet at Santa Anita through today and what have we
learned. Well for one, it takes a long time to chart the analysis of every
synthetic race to see if there are any angles out there. BTW, I was happy to do
it and it helped me learn a little about the synthetic as I delve into capping the
two big days ahead. (We took a brief timeout to look at the Belmont P6 Tuesday
night, to no avail, but a good effort and exercise nonetheless). It's a new
surface, but it's going to be around for a long time to come, and although it's
new there are some tendencies and biases to watch for.
So what did we find out. Well examining the races similar to how Bill Finley
did in his book Betting Synthetic
Surfaces, I looked at who was winning the races, wire-to-wire
(leading at first call, WTW), stalkers (second or third at first call) or
closers (fourth or worse at first call). WTW winners stood at 18.1% (27 of 149
races), Stalkers at 32.2% (48 of 149) and Closers, the leaders at 49.7% (74 of
149). Wow. The wire winners were much lower than Finley's survey of 1,300
conventional dirt tracks where they were around 30 percent. I also broke it
down to sprint (races 7 furlongs or less) and route (mile or more) and the
figures were similar to the overall percentages with a slight uptick for
closers in route races (53.1% winners). In Finley's book, the percentages on
2,039 races run at all distances show the following: WTW (19%), Stalk (26%) and
Closer (55%), so the Pro-Ride has held pretty similar to the other synthetic
surfaces included in the survey (polytrack, tapeta, cushion track).
Favorites have been winning at a 32.2% clip, very similar to where national
averages fall, with more at the sprint level (33.0%) than the route level
(30.6%). The hottest post positions have been Post 5 and 6, winning at a 18.2%
and 15.1% clip, respectively. The cooler positions appear to be inside, where
the rail is only at 8.1% and the 2 post is at 9.4%. The center of the track
appears to be producing more winners on the Pro-Ride. Good to know. The inside
positions are even worse in sprints (7% at #1 and 9% at #2). Other notables,
there have only been 3 winners in the three outside posts (all in the 12 hole),
none coming from post 13 or 14 (in a limited amount of races).
Gene
Kershner blogs at EquiSpace.
