Poly Runners At Churchill Downs......

[docicu3]

Now that CD will open today and handicappers are again faced with the question of what to do with horses that have run exclusively on Poly when form is good but the horse has never been on dirt.

Has there been enough time to make any suppositions about when you can play a poly horse on dirt at CD and when you should toss these horses due to patterns of predictable nonperformance because of distance or pedigree. I have read about everything I have been able to buy beg borrow or steal on this subject and the more I read the less clarity there is.

Does CD and it's longer stretch set up dirt routes of poly horses more like american turf racing where most route races are run at 3/4 speed until the last quarter when the race looks like Los Al racing. Do you feel less comfortable about trying to predict a poly/turf horse's performance when these horses enter a dirt route?

Is there more common performance with sprints as a poly sprint and a dirt sprint are perhaps more likely to have predictable outcomes but as races are lengthened the poly beast takes on a form of it's own with extremes of outcome that make players and their prowess as handicappers completely lost about how a race will be paced with the extreme of the thought being the Del Mar surface of last summer that started the push back from the California poly edict equaled only by the drainage enigma of Santa Anita this year.

Does anyone have a set of thoughts about how to play dirt racing with PP's that are predominantly poly races or have we identified another reason that players stay away because they didn't want to play poly and now they can't play dirt racing because the poly influence in the horses is too great?