The Jacaranda Cup weighting looks wrong. It is not.

Ridgeback is the top-weighted runner in the Jacaranda Cup. It holds 281 of the 1,000 numbers, 28.1 per cent, and is priced at $2.80 for an implied 35.7 per cent. Its last four starts read 5-9-8-0 and its career record is sixteen starts for three wins. Several readers have written in to ask whether the card is broken.

It is not. The weighting is not derived from the form, because nothing on this circuit is derived from the form. A card is published with a weighting table whose blocks sum to exactly 1,000, and the finishing order is drawn from those numbers without replacement. A runner's previous results are a record of previous draws. They are not an input to the next one, and the engine has no field in which to put them.

The same card makes the point twice more. Paper Lantern has thirteen career wins from 57 starts, more than any other runner in the field, and holds 44 numbers — 4.4 per cent, $17.91. Marble Bar holds eight numbers, 0.8 per cent, at $98.50, which is the smallest block published anywhere on this circuit. Those two have nineteen career wins between them. Ridgeback has three, and thirty-five times Marble Bar's numbers.

The Jacaranda Cup also carries the largest book on the circuit, 127.0 per cent across twelve runners. The rule of thumb is a hundred plus about two points a runner, which would put a twelve-runner field near 124. This card is three points over that, and the Class C Sprint at Saltbush Flat, also twelve runners, came in at 126.3. At the other end the Class B Sprint at Brolga Park settled on 114.4 across eight, where the thumb says 116. The overround is a per-card number rather than a constant, which is precisely why it is printed on every card.

Flatness is worth checking too. The widest spread in the programme is this Jacaranda field, where the top block is thirty-five times the bottom one. The tightest is that Brolga Park sprint at five times, with the Trial at Wattle Hill at 5.4. A tight field is not a more honest field. It is a field in which the table has less to say beforehand, and the result says even less afterwards.

Five of the cards ahead carry two runners on identical blocks: Ridgeback and Ninepin on 21 each at Coorong Park, Marble Bar and Old Telegraph on 31 each in the Mallee Park maiden, Marble Bar and Tally Room on 33 each in The Meridian, Fence Line and Half Mast on 24 each in the Wattle Hill Cup, and Half Mast and Rail Spike on 208 each in the Bellbird Steeple. In every case the two share a price, because the price is the block written another way. If one of them wins and the other runs last, as happened at Mallee Park off 20 numbers each, that is a draw doing what a draw does.