Tip of the Week: Selective Amnesia

Photo by Penelope P. Miller/America's Best Racing
There are indeed times when a handicapper has to dig a little to find reasons to bet on a horse.
Take Lavender Chrissie in the eighth race at Keeneland on Oct. 10, a second level allowance race for fillies and mares.
Check out her last two reasons and you see no reason to back her. She was ninth most recently and eighth before that.
Yet as weak as those races were, there was sufficient cause to forget about them.
The last one was Lavender Chrissie’s first race on turf, which proved to be a bad experiment.
Before that, she ran in a Grade 3 stakes, the Eight Belles at Churchill Downs, and never fired.
Yet in her previous start, Lavender Chrissie surged to a five-length win in a first-level allowance race at Gulfstream Park on March 29 for trainer Dale Romans.
While those last two races failed to inspire much confidence, they were the type of races that were too challenging for Lavender Chrissie. Just because she couldn’t win on turf or beat graded stakes runners, it didn’t mean she still couldn’t handle allowance rivals.
For those who could put a line through her poor starts on grass and in a stakes, Lavender Chrissie supplied a nice present: a three-quarters-of-a-length victory at 3-1 odds, paying $8 to win as the co-second choice and topping a $37.80 exacta with the other 3-1 horse.
THE LESSON: Sometimes there are valid reasons to forgive and forget a horse’s recent starts and rely on previous races as a true indicator of his or her talent.