RT Charts the Kentucky Derby: Who to watch for, who to avoid, and how your horse measures up
There you are, sitting in your easy chair and looking at the Kentucky Derby lineup. You look off into the distance and ponder the question, ‘how does my horse stack up against the others, numbers-wise?’
You can now relax. You have RT, The Hooptie Handicapper, to provide this to you. For free.
This is all very simple. All you have to do is open the three documents and compare.
How about a little instruction, you say? Absolutely.
First, in the spreadsheet, you are going to find an ‘RT number.’ You're also going to see a “Big Number.” Those numbers have taken a long time to develop and are proprietary. This I can tell you - they work. Will they work for this one race with twenty horses? That's certainly tough to tell, however, it will help you dump a few of the names in the group and add a few. Like adding #13 Hidden Stash.
Continuing, you will see the very top numbers in red, column D, 1 through 20. Those are the horses post position. Next, pick out your horse, look at the colors to the far right of it and find where yours landed. Then, go down to the bottom and look for it in one of the four boxes GG GR RG RR. If, for example, your horse is #13, he landed on green green, You can now tell see how it compares to the par number in its category. Of note, there are two categories that have double asterisks in them. This means of the stakes horses that have won, those two categories are rare for it to fall under. Subsequently, our resources are limited for documentation of that style. This should not preclude you from choosing one if, in fact, that's who you like. It speaks more to the terms of how little we have to compare, than it does to the quality of your horse. If you like #14 Essential Quality, you go to green red and see how he compares. Frankly, #17 Highly Motivated appears to be one of the best, as is #14 Essential Quality, #8 Hot Rod Charlie and #1 Known Agenda. Again, there are twenty horses in this race, so the real value is this allows you to pare it down and create a short list. I was quite surprised to see how poorly #10 Midnight Bourbon scored.
Next, you have two word documents. Since we are limited to how many entrants we can have per spreadsheet, this is broken down into two. In the first one, it's numbers 1 through 10 and the second is 11 through 20.
The numbers in the left graph represent, if applicable, its last four races. The numbers on the right graph are its last two races. This will help you determine how much improvement your horse has made over the last two races. There is a green box on the left with the word par, and underneath it are $$$. The top number represents its speed and the bottom number represents its class. Obviously, the higher the both of those, the better the horse.
With #14 Highly Motivated, notice that he turned in excellent races out of the four, compared to the others, and had improvement in his last two. Then, see how #18 Super Stock showed a digression in his last two. Using the bottom number as the class he’s raced in eg: Super Stock ran a 95/-100.5 in his last two races, and ran a 85.8/-47.4 over four. Since -47.4 is higher that -100.5, that easily means he ran a higher speed number against better, which is common. Yet, he has not clocked enough races of a higher caliber to make him a choice. In other words, when dictating this, you can see that he beats lesser quality horses, and when it comes to stepping up in class, yes, his numbers will jump, yet it’s not substantive enough to be in this league…yet. Think about this in terms of golf. When you play against someone who's really good, your game is going to step up. When you play against lesser, your game is going to stay the same and you may win, but the reality is you didn't improve. #13 Hidden Stash has jumped tremendously and IMHO, should be included in exotic bets.
Should you have any questions, feel free to contact me. Additionally, feel free to share any of this.
Have fun with it. I hope this helps. Happy Hunting 😊