Late Scratchings - to re-evaluate or not?
 

I've always taken scratchings into account when determining my selections. Sometimes, when there's a late scratching it will end up meaning that one of my potential selections gets promoted to a selection.

For instance, say if part of one's system was to only consider the top 4 favourites, and then one of those initial favourites scratches. In this case, I'd have then considered the new horse that would make up the top 4 favs and then run it through my other filters to see if it qualifies.

I was wondering if this is something you guys do, or do you just leave your initial selections as they are despite any scratchings, or maybe just drop the race from consideration altogether. Just curious.

Personally a late scratching is too late for me to go over the race again and I just stick to my main selections.

Why not do it the other way around?
Select ALL the qualifiers first. You might not even have four qualifiers?
Good luck

As I don't consider anything as deep as "shape of the race", likely pace of the race, etc., I just select my top however many out of what's left. As far as I'm concerned its just another race with one less runner, the best of what's left is still the best, the second best of what's left is still the second best.
People who judge how a race is going to be run no doubt would think differently.

KV

i think you need to look at history to see what you do. go back and check what happens in the past and see whether the new top rater performs as good as the whole sample of top raters. if it does and there is time to rerun you filters then it would be good thing to do.
Thank you. Winston.

Just to state the obvious - if you're pricing you're selections and the scratched runners were significant inthe market, you need to re-evaluate or your prices will be up the spout.

Wesmip1,
That's fair enough.

Marcus,
Yep, I usually list all my potential qualifiers, and slowly mark them off as I go through my filters. It ends up being fairly easy this way to review my potential qualifiers if there does happen to be a late scratching that might add a new selection. Hope that makes sense. I typically only have 1 qualifier per race, though occassionaly will come up with 2.

KennyVictor,
That makes sense. Maybe I'm making too big a deal about late scratchings.

Winston_Smith,
Well said. Exactly, what I will do.

Shoto,
I'm still very new to horse-racing (not quite 2 years yet), and there's a lot I still need to learn. Honestly, I would not have a clue on where to begin in trying to come up with my own prices for horses, so that's not relevant to me, but I understand your point.

Thanks guys for sharing your thoughts. I just checked my selections for yesterday, and it seems no late scratchings had any influence (no new qualifiers as a result of a late scratching). I honestly thought late scratchings would have had more of an impact on my system. I have noted in the past that I've had an occassional new qualifier arise because of a late scratching, but haven't kept good enough notes to work out which they were and how thay have fared. I'll have to review this again after next Saturday's races to see if anything changes. Thanks again for sharing your thoughts.