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| By | Horse watch UDMS | |
| Jim the Tolerable 8/21/2009 5:50:03 PM | One of these days I will learn to listen to Jeff more. He encouraged me to use the horse watch feature in JCapper rather than the various virtual stables out there. Well, I missed two horses in the last two days (pretty much exaclty like Jeff said I would). I am now going to move all of my watched horses into JCapper. For those that use the feature, how do you organize the watch UDMS? I have a pretty exrtensive watch list and (when I don't miss them) it is pretty profitable. My idea is to name these UDM's something like w_SECRETARIAT. The idea being that they will group together alphabetically and not "polute" the UDM list in the wizard or the data window. Any good ideas being used out there?
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| jeff 8/21/2009 8:17:25 PM | One user that I talked to has them organized by trip type. He names them things like A_trip, B_trip, Neg_trip, etc. It doesn't really matter what type of a trip an A_trip is. What IS important to him is to have every horse name recorded in the watchList field for a WatchList based UDM be there because it had a similar trip type. From talking to him I get a very strong sense that the hierarchy is meaningful and works for him. -jp .
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| jeff 8/22/2009 1:20:43 AM | Expanding on this a little... Let's say for example one of the things you watch for are how horses gallop out after the race is over. Your own hand kept records indicate horses that gallop out strongly are often better bets than horses that don't. One way that I've seen it done is to write down their names with the track and race date on a page in a day planner. Something like this:
A few weeks later as these horses return to race again, the player can look up each of their names by first letter of the horse name in the day planner and see if the horse has a trip note attached to its name. It's a painstaking process time-wise but one that can pay off handsomely for the player with a talent for recognizing what to look for. Here the player is using codes to describe what he saw. GOS stands for Galloped Out Strongly. And PUS stands for Pulled Up Short. Please understand that the player who showed me this process is a keen observer and keeps very detailed notes about what he sees. But these are NOT HIS ACTUAL TRIP NOTES. Nor are they mine. It's just an example of how the process works. The process allows the player to look up each horse running on a given card one at a time in a day planner. Another way is to key them into stable mail and hope that you see the stable mail and remember why you added the horse's name to stable mail in the first place. Or you can add the names of the horses to the WatchList field in the UDM Wizard for a UDM you created for the specific category of trip note that you want to be reminded about when the horse comes back to race. Continuing with the example that you want to know about GOS horses... You create a UDM and name it something like trip_GOS. From your own carefully kept records you've determined that a GOS is only really worthwhile when the horse comes back to race within 9o days. So you set a factor constraint where Recent Activity Days Last Start has a max val = 90 and you click the Test box and hit Save. About that: YOU have to determine if 90 days is the right number. Let your own records tell you that. After you've accumualated a few hundred race results for a UDM like this you can certainly run it through the Data Windoe broken out by Rec Activity Days Last Start and SEE what the right number is. That's the only real way. Anything short of that is just a guess. A lot of people doing stuff like this manually have no real idea how to make best use of their own information. Continuing on... Given the above GOS horses, the WatchList field itself looks like this: SMART DRESSED MAN-SLEWS KID-SLEW THE DRAGON Individual horse names are added with each name separated by a dash character. Also note that the UDM Wizard strips out the apostrophe character from the horse names. Don't worry about it. That's done to facilitate a SQL name match. The WatchList field itself is large enough to contain several thousand individual names. On race day, when a GOS horse comes back to race within 90 days (or the number you provide) of it's previous race where you made the trip note - the Profile Marker flags the horse on your HTML and/or Text Report so that you'll know about it. If you're really into making detailed trip notes you might want to keep your notes in a spreadsheet concurrently with entering horse names into a WatchList UDM - and then periodically delete individual horse names from WatchList UDMs when appropriate. But that's up to you. That's about as thorough a description of how WatchList works as I'm likely to write up. The real benefit belongs to those with a sharp eye who are willing to keep at it. -jp .
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| Jim the Tolerable 8/22/2009 8:57:07 AM | Thanks, Jeff. I do like to keep more detailed notes and I wasn't getting my head around the flow of how to do it effeciently. I think a combination of general UDMs with manually kept notes (either online or spreadsheet) will fit what I am trying to accomplish.
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