British Banker

My sixth pick (and first Tier C pick) is British Banker, a colt by Touch Gold out of Collect the Cash.

I'm fairly certain that I'll be one of the least pedigree savvy people entering Stars of the Turf. Usually when I enter a fantasy sports contest of any sort, I'm pretty obsessive about learning everything I can. I create spreadsheets, test correlations between various factors, read all the existing literature I can find, and test the more popular theories about how to predict performance. But pedigree analysis (which is what I consider this contest to be about) is such a complex topic, with so much, that I'm not going to be able to take things that seriously this year.

In the meantime, I'm going to be using common sense mixed with a few general statistical principles that generally yield good results in any type of 'forecasting' to come up a basic approach to my picks. Here are my thoughts so far:

1. In the case of selecting sires, there's a large enough sample size of their offspring that I'm going to look directly at the performance of their children. At the higher stud fees, there's no reason to go with an unproven sire.

2. In the case of selecting dams, sample size is a major issue. Even in a case like Better than Honour or Personal Ensign, where more than 50% of their children have been major stakes winners, this is an issue. Think about it for a minute...has there ever been a sire with 50% stakes winning offspring? Do we really believe that the influence of the dam is THAT much more than the sire? These have to be statistical flukes...which is fairly typical of what happens with small sample sizes. Obviously these are likely to be very successful dams, but I don't think we can expect Better than Honour to continue to give birth to a steady string of stakes winners, just because she has so far.

3. Although racing records of most horses are an equally small sample size, there is a lot less variance in the data, so they're more reliable. While Better than Honour's next foal may be a $5K claimer, it's very unlikely that when healthy Rags to Riches would ever lose a race to a $5K claimer. So even though what we're really interested in is their ability to give birth to top performers, I think we can best predict that indirectly, by evaluating mares primarily on their racing record.

Basically that's my approach - pick horses by a sire with a proven record at stud out of a mare who was successful on the track.

Now it's time to start learning how things really work.