I think getting people to handicap after Mondays races, then one for Tuesday, then one for Wednesday may be easier. saves looking for horses as you tend to do it races by race when adjusting the marks anyway

Its a difficult one for sure, although capping by day maybe easier than capping by age and distance.

So 10 races a day fields of 15, that's 150 horses per day to cap, but if we have 20+ flat trainers we are up to 200 per day and that's only with a single entry.

I think, if we want to get a season underway then harsh decisions need to be made.

It must be better to have 5-10 horses run every day than none at all and being the capping is the major sticking point, we need to alleviate as much as possible so that we get some volunteers.

We have got a bit spoilt with 40+ flat races a week, double entries & large stables.

We can always return to full schedule, max runners, stables etc. in the future.

What exactly is involved in the handicapping? is dropbox required? paid or free version? do they watch the races early?

Sounds like best option could be to let the game do it, with manual adjustments from Vinny & Gray.

Or to spread it out, you could run the full flat league first and then the jumps league after. or run them both together but have a two week break in between gameweeks

Reading between the lines, Leon is the only person who can add or remove races and it says he is unable to at the moment.

If handicapping is easy to teach im happy to give it a go. Apart from knowing the idea behind it etc, i wouldnt know where to start, so would need help/instructions

The handicapping just involves going through each race and adjusting the mark in TOM. At the same time Alex/Gray would have sent you the races in a zip file, and you adjust them in a Construction Kit slightly different to the CK in your game. There's nothing special to it. You then send the adjusted files back to Alex/Gray.

It's not a difficult process, you pick out a horse in the race with a solid handicap that has ran to it, an adjust the others around it based on their performance. It's more time consuming than difficult when you have to do it each night

would prefer not to have game handicapping then adjusting the foreign races, that is a non starter and would cause more problems.

It does requires dropbox as you get the files from there, update them then upload them and overwrite the old ones.

I done it for that season with Gray just e-mailing me the races, I loaded them to the Race kit, and adjusted them in there to match TOM, there's no need for Dropbox to handicap

Just throwing it in here but why not race every other week so the handicapper/s can do their job and also entries could then maybe open earlier, might even give race runners and commentators more time. I know this turns the normally quarterly season into half a year season but at least it would be easier on all.

That a pretty good idea.

Another way would be to alternate flat and nh so there were only half as many races to do each week. This would still mean the season lasted 26 weeks instead of 13 but there would be something to watch every week.

Alternative weeks would be interesting.

26 weeks ? lol i will Pass I do play other games and like to take a break.

Gray

Yeah 6 months is a tad too long to commit too, as Gray says, some of us have a life

just a silly idea
but what about getting rid of a few handicap races and have more maiden races ? less for anyone doing handicap races
handicap produces a lot of runners
so un- top trainers have chances of getting a win or places
maybe a poor idea

Not overly silly Del We are trying to slim the schedule down as discussed at the back end of last season, but losing even more handicaps where the majority of trainers ply their trade is not going to be the answer, they would still need a mark.

The ideas above are not without merit in trying to alleviate the issue, but extending a season to 26 weeks is probably not practical for most, maybe cut stable sizes ? Which would go in hand with the tightening of the schedule, less horses, less work!

Of course not ideal, but we have got to the position where if nothing gets decided or a willing flat handicap volunteer steps forward, we will be trail running until SO8..... Doh!

With the talk of SO8, is it safe to assume that the next league will be the last of SO7?