Most serious researchers probably know that chaos races are easy to spot after the fact, but not quite so easy beforehand. Well, I think chaos ensues when none of the horses in the race really want to exert early energy. But I define that a little differently from most folks. I am only talking about dirt racing because grass tends to be late more often than dirt.

Sartin followers are probably familiar with %M (percent median). It shows in which part of a race a horse exerts energy, early or late. I believe this is the true running style of the horse. But, from which race? I think all of them. Huh? I take the median of all of the %M's available and refer to it as M%M.

Through a little research, I split the M%M figures into somewhat equal categories and those are my E, E/P, P, P/S, S and L running styles.

I then assign numbers to those 6 running styles, 1 for E down to 6 for L.

Then I average the running style numbers for all of the horses in the race. So, a typical race will be somewhere around 2.0 to 3.0.

So, when that race running style is high (at least 3.2), I find the race becomes more likely to be chaotic. Why? I think it is because some horse or horses are called on to atypically expend early energy and that is not what they are accustomed to doing and the other horses try to keep up and many tire. You end up with a horse that has relatively poor speed figures winning the race coming from off the pace... chaos.

So, which horse wins? I find that it is often a horse with low Quirin speed points and has shown an ability to close in recent races, in position and/or lengths, preferably both. Yes, even if it only went from 9th to 4th or even 5th to 4th. Not backing up is the key.

Admittedly this is somewhat theoretical at this point. I haven't fully proven it. And, I am still looking for more criteria as to when to utilize it.

It should be noted that my running styles are often much different from published running styles. In my opinion, the published styles tend to be better correlated to position rather than fractional speed.

Also, this often does not work when there is a clearly superior horse in the race.

And, for anyone who doesn't know, chaos races and superior early speed account for a significant portion of high payout races. Sometimes 20/1 and more.

Any thoughts?