What are the best past performance forms?

[Trigger]

This is not just a gambling question, while horseman have much deeper inside knowledge to the up coming race they're in, and likely will need data to understand their competition and or create their own racing strategy.

T-Bred

DRF for more lines of pp history and Brisnet for the data.  I do not like Equibase but I can read it.

Harness

I think Trackmaster Platinum rules, you get the lines and the data, and TEMPERATURE at race time.

Free track forms or any old free form can't hurt if it has data, analysis others don't.

Maybe some of these horses show in their lifetime of racing patterns, the only way to see them is lifetime past performances and that is an investment I'm looking into.

Thorough Graph I need to take a week or so to learn it, have access to free for years and never took the time.

[Papillon]

this is actually an excellent topic to start a thread about




we all have our own opinions and methods we use as far as past performances go....having said that I have a very unpopular view of the most revered, famous tool used by most--the Beyer figure

the most over rated, over hyped, subjective number out there is the Beyer fig--but many are completely obsessed by it

Beyer numpers do not take into account what "path" a horse has taken, how much ground was covered/lost during the running of the race. Two people, Randy Moss(the bald white guy not the GOAT wide receiver) and Dick Jerardi(local philly college basketball beat writer) perform most of the Beyers nationwide--and they are not objective--they make up numpers based on if they like/dislike a horse

I can vividly recall California Chrome and Zenyatta--two of the most popular horses that the pom pom waving Cali media ever saw--having points arbitrarily added to their races, because the fans liked them. One race Chrome won--the fans were very upset that the number assigned wasn't high enough for them--so Andy Beyer himself instructed his minions to freely add 10 points to his race a month after the race was run--to satisfy his fans and popularity.
The same was done with Zenyatta a couple of times

now I can appreciate that "fan popularity" is important to the success of the sport--as the game needs heroes--but to add numpers without merit to popular horses is not what I consider objective-but then again I am not from California.

the Beyer numpers has made many fans/bettors/handicappers simply flat out lazy--instead of really digging into the data--they just obsessively stare at that "bolded" numper in the DRF.... its faster, easier and doesn't require much work or skill--but most are of the belief the numper is scientific, which is completely misguided thinking. ...the DRF makes millions off the lazy people who blindly believe that numper