in Triple Crown Free Picks

Just when you thought racing fans and bettors had it tough enough, with being totally disrespected by most of the tracks and being gauged by the take out, now we have to deal with how to evaluate horses coming from totally different surfaces.

The Second City now has those same concerns as Arlington is well within their first Polytrack meet and results of last weekend kind of prove that there just are no rules.

Sure, there can be trends, and sure there can be perceived biases, but the truth of the matter is that nothing means nothing unless you tell your buddy that a certain thing is going to unfold, you unload the wallet and you walk to the window.

Bettors have to be careful about taking perceived biases as if they came down from Mt. Sinai.

Take for instance the statistics courtesy of a piece on the Hawthorne web site.

Speaking about lessons to be learned, the number one lesson on the site is that some other artificial tracks favor stamina over speed. Lesson three, and this one kind of makes sense, is that runners that show ability on turf can often transfer that ability to a synthetic surface.

Lesson three will be an on going discussion. Some horses that are regally bred, either for dirt or turf, can’t run at all.

As far as the stamina over speed issue, the site came up with some nice stats.

Consider the percentage of wire-to-wire winners at the final dirt meet of Turfway going a mile and a sixteenth.

Those numbers respectively came back 26%, 41%, and 30% for an average wire-to-wire winner of the three tracks at 32%.

In the first artificial track meet for those same tracks, the wire-to-wire stats were 12%, 5% and 13% respectively, for an average of 17% overall.

Those are drastic numbers, but will they hold up?

Consider what happened at Arlington just this last Sunday. The first 5 of 6 winners went virtually flag fall to that’s all at prices from 4 to 5 to 9-2.

The winner of the 5th stalked and pounced at eleven to one.

Then it changed. The 7th through 10th winners came from the clouds at prices ranging from 8-5 to 38-1.

One day does not make a season, but it just goes to show you that you can’t rule this game by being strict.

Also consider where the winners on Sunday had previously raced and another viewpoint is heard from.

Five winners were making their first start on the synthetic and one of those 5 had extensive turf experience. The other 5 winners had either raced on a synthetic surface in the past, or had gotten an important race over the new Polytrack course at Arlington.

What does this all mean? Not quite sure, but one would probably be wise to wait to heavily invest on a runner on the synthetic going only after that runner has proven he can handle that sort of surface.

With the synthetic rage becoming virtually nationwide, things will come better into focus eventually. Until that happens, try to bend the rules instead of blindly following them.

Keep checking the Locker Room all through the .