How do you keep a rope horse from anticipating the start?

Anticipation in the box is a training problem created by repetition — the horse has made enough runs that it has mapped the sequence precisely and begins responding to earlier and earlier cues in the chain until it is reacting to the roper's body shift or the cattle loading rather than waiting for the actual departure cue. The horse is not wrong to anticipate in the sense that it has learned exactly what every preceding event predicts, but the anticipation costs the roper control of the timing and often results in barrier penalties or a horse that is so wound up in the box that the roper cannot think. The correction requires deliberately breaking the predictive chain the horse has built. Vary every element of the pre-run sequence that can be varied: sometimes sit quietly in the box for two minutes before nodding, sometimes ride in and back out without making a run, sometimes nod and then do nothing while the steer escapes without chasing it. The horse must learn that none of the preceding events in the sequence reliably predict the departure — only the rider's specific cue does. Backing the horse in the box is a useful tool for horses that creep forward in anticipation: the moment the horse's weight shifts forward without being asked, back it several steps, re-square it, and wait. The horse learns that forward movement before the cue produces more waiting, not the run it wanted. Horses that are run too frequently relative to the number of times they are stood in the box will always tend toward anticipation — the ratio of standing to running matters as much as any specific correction.