The first published window

Eight cards have settled on the published circuit and the full weighting table for each one is on the site. This is what they add up to. Figures are as at 18 October 2026, read off the resulted cards and the standings file, which own them.

Eight cards at eight of the ten venues, 70 runners, no dead heats, no scratchings and no non-runners — the last three by construction rather than by luck, since a draw without replacement cannot produce a tie and a field is fixed when the card is published. Coorong Park and Jacaranda Downs have no resulted card in this window, so nothing below says anything about either.

Favourites: two from eight, against 2.20

The market leader won twice. Red Gum Rebel held 309 of the 1,000 numbers in the Class C Mobile Pace and won it by a neck from Gidgee Gold in 1:53.8. Half Mast held 210 in the Class C Sprint at Saltbush Flat and won in 57.2 from Dry Lightning, 1.8 lengths.

Add the true probability of each card's best-weighted runner and the eight sum to 220.1 per cent, so the expected number of winning favourites across the window is 2.20. Two were observed. That is the entire finding, and it is the finding the paper wanted: the draw is doing what the table says it will do.

The six beaten favourites are more interesting individually than collectively:

Southern Split's 342 numbers are the largest block any runner has held in a resulted race on this circuit, and it finished third. Brindle Jack held 241 of 1,000 at Brolga Park and ran last of eight. Neither is an upset in any sense the engine recognises: a runner holding a quarter of the numbers misses three times in four.

One horse, three wins, three prices

Stockyard Gate won three of the eight. The prices were $12.78 in the Trial at Wattle Hill, from 67 numbers; $5.51 in the Class A Synthetic at Tin Creek, from 152; and $40.78 in the Class B Flat at Mallee Park, from 20. Its career record now reads 43-9-5-3 at a 20.9 per cent strike rate, with a form string of 4-4-1-1-0-1.

The Mallee Park win is the one worth sitting with. Twenty numbers of 1,000 is a true probability of 2.0 per cent and an implied 2.5 at that book. Two runners held identical 20-number blocks at $40.78 on that card: Stockyard Gate at number one and Half Mast at number two. One won. The other finished tenth of ten, beaten 27 lengths. Same block, same price, same draw, opposite ends of the result — which is the clearest demonstration this circuit has produced that a price is a frequency and never a forecast.

The dividend figures on that card are the widest of the window: $40.78 the win, $14.26 the place, $104.86 the Forecast and $146.54 the Tricast, all reference figures in credits, because nothing is staked here.

Where the margins went

Three of the eight were settled inside a length. A short half-head separated Stockyard Gate from Bitumen in the Trial at Wattle Hill, 0.75 lengths covered Stockyard Gate and Paper Lantern at Tin Creek, and a neck decided the Class C Mobile Pace. At the other end, the last finisher was beaten 34 lengths at Saltbush Flat, 27 at Mallee Park and 26 in the same Saltbush Flat race one place further up.

Those margins come from the renderer, not from the table. Coorong Park has the shortest straight on the gallops at 350 metres and will produce short margins when it settles a card for the same reason: the geometry file says so. The finishing order came from 1,000 numbers and the gaps were drawn afterwards.

Two times are worth printing against the real sport. Red Gum Rebel's 1:53.8 over 1609 metres at Kurrajong Paceway is a mile rate of 1:53.8, and Harbour Flyer's 2:39.5 over 2240 metres at Gidgee Paceway rates 1:54.6. Harness Racing NSW's sectional sheet for Menangle on Saturday 3 October 2026 shows ordinary metropolitan 1609-metre mobiles rating between 1:51.1 and 1:54.8 (read 18 October 2026). Both circuit figures sit inside that band, which is a statement about how the renderer was calibrated and not about either horse.

The standings are counts, not rates

Eight cards is not a season. The strike-rate column on the people pages is arithmetically correct and statistically meaningless, and it will stay that way for a while.

Faisal Karim's three wins are Stockyard Gate's three wins, which is the whole of his column. Vera Lindqvist has three thirds from eight runners and Trudy Aspinall two seconds and a third from six, and neither figure means anything beyond itself.

Among the riders, Priya Sandhu has two wins from five rides, Jonty Mapp and Kaz Tupou one each from five. Among the drivers, Marnie Kessel and Dale Prentice have one win from two drives apiece, which the file renders as a 50 per cent strike rate and which this paper will call one from two until there is more of it. Two of the eight winners are absent from both tables: one was ridden by a rider the circuit does not carry a profile for, and one was a greyhound, which has no rider at all.

A hypothesis that failed

Before the Maiden Flat at Mallee Park was published, this desk expected a maiden field to carry a flat weighting: no winners, nothing to separate them, blocks of roughly equal size. It does not. Dry Lightning holds 236 numbers, Ridgeback 212 and Bitumen 188, while Marble Bar and Old Telegraph hold 31 each and Ninepin 19. That is a 12-fold spread between the longest and shortest blocks.

The flattest head of market in a ten-runner field on the whole programme is in fact the Handicap Flat at the same venue, where the best-weighted runner holds 210. The widest is the Class B Mobile Pace at Kurrajong, where Harbour Flyer holds 352 numbers for an implied 40.8 per cent. Class is not a predictor of flatness on this circuit, and the desk prints the failed expectation because printing only the ones that worked would make the column worthless.

Two numbers that have nothing to do with each other

The best career strike rate on the circuit belongs to Pennyroyal: 49 starts, 13 wins, 26.5 per cent. In the Class C Sprint at Saltbush Flat, Pennyroyal held 13 numbers of 1,000 and finished twelfth of twelve, beaten 34 lengths. Career form and the current weighting are two unconnected columns on the same page, and the only one that decides a race is the second. The full programme, cards, standings and downloads sit in machine-readable form, and the method is at how a virtual race is decided.