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PICKS SETTLED
📄 Today’s Consensus Sheet — every race on one printable page (PDF): Download today’s consensus sheet
Single-pick accounting — official picks: 32 settled · 11 winners · ROI -6.8%. Winner was the official pick in 11 of 32 races.
In the money: 23 of 36 pick legs (64%) finished 1st, 2nd or 3rd.
The 12 winners paid an average of $5.67 on a $2 win ticket.
Across the board: $2 win-place-show on every pick — $190 → $167.60 · ROI -11.8%. (1 pool stake(s) refunded — the chart printed no price for that pool.)
Full settled card, every pick graded: results.thoroughwiz.com/2026-11-08/selections/
Our Figures Explained · No. 2
The pounds figure beside a horse’s name on the sheet is not the weight the horse carries in the race. It is our rating expressed in pounds: a single number that states how the horse’s own adjusted running lines compare with the rated population, written on a scale a reader already knows how to read. A higher weight marks the stronger record on our figures. A lower weight marks the weaker one.
The rating underneath starts with the horse’s own lines. Each scored line in the line store carries an adjusted speed figure, built with track constants and the projection method described in the first installment of this series. Today’s ratings were fit on 125,488 scored lines. The system aggregates a horse’s lines with recent form weighted more heavily, takes a recency-weighted median, and adds a quarter of the gap toward the horse’s best line. It then shrinks the result toward the average for the horse’s track-and-class segment. Horses with three or fewer scored lines are shrunk harder, and their ratings are capped so a thin history cannot run to an extreme. A layoff beyond 90 days subtracts half a point for each further 30 days away.
The finished rating is centred on the rated population, and the sheet converts it to pounds with one fixed rule: weight = 120 + 5.43 × rating. The anchor is 120. A rating of zero — the average rated horse — prints as 120 lb. Each rating point is worth about five and a half pounds, so a horse at 132 lb sits twelve pounds above par on our figures, and a horse at 113 lb sits seven below.
Today’s free race shows the scale at work. Mountaineer Race 8, tonight at 9:55 PM ET, is a five-and-a-half-furlong dirt claiming race with fourteen starters. Every starter carries a measured weight, and the field spreads nineteen pounds, from 132 down to 113:
| Horse | Morning line | Weight | Rating | Lines behind it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #7 Mischievous Juan | 2/1 | 132 lb | +2.21 | 12 |
| #8 Smart Coverage | 20/1 | 129 lb | +1.61 | 7 |
| #9 No Name Dude | 10/1 | 128 lb | +1.40 | 7 |
| #3 Sneads | 4/1 | 121 lb | +0.22 | 18 |
| #11 Gilligan | 15/1 | 113 lb | −1.30 | 12 |
| #13 Alvin | 20/1 | 113 lb | −1.36 | 10 |
Read the table inside this race only. Mischievous Juan, the 2/1 morning-line favourite and the filed pick, also carries the field’s top weight at 132 lb. Smart Coverage is priced at 20/1 and still rates second on weight at 129 lb — the weight follows the horse’s own lines, not the line-maker’s order. Sneads, the 4/1 second choice and the pick’s backup, sits near par at 121 lb despite holding the deepest history in this group, eighteen scored lines. The sheet never displays weights across races side by side, and a reader should not carry them there either: each field is read on its own scale, against its own company.
The basis behind a weight matters as much as the number. Today’s card holds 200 starters: 187 carry measured weights, 7 rest on a single scored line, and 6 are first-time starters printed at exactly 120 lb and labelled as such. That 120 is a placeholder for display, not a measurement — the system has no lines to measure. A horse with starts but no scored line gets no weight at all. The system never estimates one to fill the space.
Use the weight for what it measures. It is one of the five factors that score points in the consensus, and inside the filing it can act as a signal when connected horses sit four or more pounds apart. It does not reorder the morning-line ranking on its own, and it says nothing about where a horse runs early or late — that is the work of the pace percentiles and the two graphs, which this series takes up next.